


More Things in Heaven and Earth

by pudupudu



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Established Relationship, Ghosts, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-17
Updated: 2016-04-12
Packaged: 2018-05-21 06:14:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 37
Words: 44,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6041239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pudupudu/pseuds/pudupudu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Following on from the events of Sixthlight's wonderful AU 'Changes of Perspective.'</p><p>Architect Peter Grant gets more than he bargained for when investigating a building site. Thomas Nightingale is having trouble with his central heating. These two matters are not linked- or are they?</p><p>(Or, 'in which Peter got his degree, Nightingale is retired- mostly- and David Mellenby is surprisingly active, all things considered.')</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sixthlight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sixthlight/gifts).



I’m the scientific sort, in general. Or at least I flatter myself that I have a rational mind. Over the past couple of years, however, I’ve had a lot of rethinking to do about the nature of science and rationality (or possibly the science and rationality of nature). A lot of rethinking about most things, actually. Partially to blame for this was Isaac Newton and his illicit dabblings into the world of magic, which is something the two of us now had in common- well, that and a complex relationship with apples, but that’s another story. Part time, unsanctioned wizard though I now am (and yes, I did have to pinch myself, regularly, because I can do _magic_ ), I still have a legitimate, and I like to think equally cool, front to maintain: that of an up and coming young architect.

Apparently, it wasn’t all that common for a practitioner (the Folly doesn’t like people outside their hallowed halls to be referred to as ‘wizards’- not that I care much what they think- and ‘magician’ sounds a bit too Paul Daniels) to also be interested in architecture. It wasn’t unheard of, at least now, but it wasn’t as much of a thing as I’d have thought it would have been, especially given the fact building materials maintain _vestigium_ better than almost anything else. Except plastic, it turns out, but that’s just weird.

 _Vestigia_ is the term given to the imprint magic leaves behind; and it does a really good job of leaving it on old buildings. Of course, ‘magic’ is a broad term; it doesn’t have to be that someone was casting spells in the area, other things leave their mark, too; strong emotions, dramatic events and even smells can linger long after their time. Most people don’t notice these things, they just brush them off as flights of fancy or their own memories, but I’d had training, not to mention a professional interest in knowing all I could about the history of an area. It makes for a more authentic build.

That was why, at 9pm on a cold, January night, rather than being sat at home in front of the tele with a takeaway and central heating at full blast, I was casually groping the foundation stones of an old building near to University College. The recently demolished 60s labs had stood on top of some much older ruins which I hadn’t been able to find much information about when consulting the traditional research tools of old town plans and Wikipedia. I was just about to make a note of some of the sensations I’d experienced in a book I’d taken to carrying around with me- there were quite a lot of them; as I said, old building- when I came to the unsettling realisation that I was being watched.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a figure in the shadows. A slender man of average height wearing an old fashioned suit of the sort one Thomas Nightingale- my magical teacher, friend and now longterm partner in bed / possibly crime if you ask almost anyone at the Folly, which I wouldn’t recommend- favoured. Turning to look directly at him, because, frankly, it’s not rude to stare _back_ at someone, I saw that he wore similarly outdated glasses and a mild, curious expression and had a shock of unruly dark hair. When he caught my eye, he smiled and rubbed at the back of his neck, a gesture of embarrassment, I thought.

“Hullo,” he greeted me, his voice suiting his dress sense, “did you find what you were looking for?”

I stood up, because though he seemed friendly enough he was still clearly a bit of a weirdo and I didn’t particularly want to be at a disadvantage. “Yeah, maybe,” I answered as noncommittally as I could.

The man nodded sagely, as if I’d made some profound remark, but made no move to come closer. In fact, he appeared so concerned about staying out of the light that I felt that unpleasant shivering sensation that I often did when encountering something that Thomas would term ‘uncanny’ for the first time. I was just attempting to figure out a way of assessing whether or not he was actually a ghost (it didn’t seem polite to just come out and ask him), or just a bloke with sensitive eyes and an anachronistic fashion sense, when he introduced himself.

“David Mellenby.”

My ears started ringing and I think I must have gaped. The man- Mellenby- rubbed his neck again and stepped forwards. I could see right through him. This wasn’t as much of a surprise as it might have been if I hadn’t seen several ghosts before by this point, but I was still reeling with shock from his introduction.

Mellenby, clearly having interpreted my stunned silence as a reaction to his incorporeal state, gave me a sympathetic look. “Terribly sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you, but one does get so bored of milling about out of sight and out of mind. I’ve tried experimenting with different light intensities and speculations about the refractive index of ghostly matter, but it makes no odds. My body, such as it is, remains stubbornly translucent.”

My mouth worked silently several times, and he cocked his head in a look of wry amusement that reminded me of Thomas. _Holy crap, Thomas_. I think he was expecting me to react as any normal person might have and shriek ‘ghost!’ before fleeing. Or possibly fainting. Instead, when words finally came, they were incredulous for a different reason entirely, “you’re _David_ _Mellenby_?”

The man. Ghost. Mellenby, blinked a couple of times and frowned. “Yes, I am. If not in body, then certainly in spirit. I must say that I’m surprised you’ve heard of me. A touch flattered, perhaps, but then…” his expression turned darkly serious, “that rather depends on the context.”

“Oh, no! Nothing like… I’ve only heard good things,” I tried to reassure him, but how do you go about comforting a ghost? “I learned all about you in my free time at university...” well, maybe not _all_ about him. Not then, anyway, that came later. “Your work on the science of magic was absolutely…”  realising that I was sounding dangerously like a raging fanboy, I stopped abruptly.

Mellenby looked pleased, if a little surprised, and was regarding me curiously. “You were up at Oxford?” ‘Up’ being posh-boy speak for ‘at university in,’ I presumed, rather than a question about day trips.

I shook my head, “I’m an architect. I went to Coventry.” Coventry is the perfect setting for an idealistic young student architect because it’s very easy to imagine how much better things might be if you could just flatten the whole lot of it and try again. Just as long as you didn’t think too much about what it looked like before the war compared to now…

Ghost Mellenby’s transparent features creased into a frown, “but you are a practitioner? Or at least you are familiar with _vestigium_ ; why else would you be so interested in those old stones?”

I couldn’t think of a way to explain the convoluted process by which I became an apprentice- not without being there all night, in any case- so I cast a pristine werelight by way of explanation, the luminous white ball hovering just above my hand.

As it turned out, this might not have been my brightest moment. Every wizard has their own particular magic signature- their _signare_ \- which makes every spell unique to its caster. As a mere wet eared apprentice, I had yet to develop a _signare_ of my own, unless you count my unfortunate tendency to blow things up, and so my spells closely resembled those of my Master (in a purely apprentice-pupil sense, you understand), that is to say-

“ _Thomas_ ,” the ghost exclaimed and shot backwards as if he had been burned. I’d barely had time to process what happened, let alone try to formulate an explanation, before David Mellenby faded from sight, as if he had never been.

_Shit._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two chapters today because this one's a short 'un. More tomorrow.

I trudged, heavy limbed, towards Warren Street, caught the Tube to Victoria, changed to the District Line, caught a bus, caught another bus, walked and then, before my brain had had time to catch up, I was home. This being a Friday evening, my flatmate, Jaget Kumar, was still awake and playing what looked like Assasin’s Creed, though I couldn’t have told you for sure. And if that wasn’t a sign of how rattled I was, nothing was. 

Though I didn’t hear his greeting, he must have said something because he looked up at me in confusion when I didn’t respond. I must have looked pretty bad, because he paused the game. “Peter? What’s up? You look like you’ve seen…” he trailed off, because he knew about the ‘weird shit’, now, and didn’t want to tempt fate. But he was, of course, entirely correct.

“Yeah, mate, I’m fine. It’s been a long day,” I lied, rubbing at my neck and then catching myself as I was reminded, uncomfortably, of Mellenby. 

Jaget frowned, clearly not believing me. He wasn’t stupid. “Hmm. Well, whatever it is, I ran into Thomas a couple of hours ago when I went to get milk. He’s back early from… whatever it was he was doing,” he knew better than to ask about such things. Like I said, not stupid. “Maybe he’ll be able to sort you out,” there was a sly tone to his voice and he clearly intended to get a rise out of me with euphemism, but I remained resolutely shell-shocked. Jaget frowned, “unless he’s the problem…?” He looked worried and I knew that he was poised, ready to be outraged if I said yes, but I shook my head and he stood down. He’s a good friend, even if he does play my games and put them back in the wrong boxes. 

Torn between wanting to go to Thomas and thinking that, actually, he was the last person I wanted to see in the world right now, I hesitated for a few moments before sighing. Thomas would still be wide awake, I suspected, and probably waiting for me to come home and be informed- as I had been- that he was back, too. I hadn’t seen him in a week, the longest we’d been apart in the year and a bit we’d been together, and I knew I’d been driving Jaget mad in his absence. ‘Pining,’ he’d called it. I argued most strongly against such terms, though Thomas’s dog, Toby, had certainly been restless in his absence. And if I sympathised with him enough to bring extra sausages along on our walks… well, that was between me and him. 

I nodded to Jaget and picked up my keys. I didn’t remember having put them down. “Yeah. Right. I’ll see you tomorrow.” I was vaguely aware of being wished a good night- and might even have responded to it- and then I was out in the corridor, leaning against the door and wondering what the hell I was going to tell Thomas.

“Hi, welcome home. What have I been up to? Well, this evening I went to a building site and ran into your long time partner and possibly soul mate, if you go in for that sort of thing, who died forty years ago. Then I did magic, he sensed you and buggered off. Oh, and by the way, he didn’t happen to hang himself, did he? only he seemed to have a sore neck.” I didn’t think that would go down too well, somehow, but I’m a terrible liar, especially when it comes to keeping things from Thomas. Still, I  _ had _ missed him…

I took a deep breath, straightened my back, puffed out my chest and walked down the stairs to his flat. 


	3. Chapter 3

I tapped my knuckles against Thomas’s door: no response. Already on edge, I immediately leapt to a lot of conclusions that weren’t necessarily logical, but it had been one of those days. What if he’d been hurt on his trip away? He’d hardly have told Jaget. What if he’d overdone the magic and had a stroke, or something? That was far more likely a scenario than it ought to have been and explained why there were so few (happy, healthy) wizards about. 

What if Gareth Sutton- our unfriendly neighbourhood ethnically challenged practitioner- had come by looking for revenge or something similarly unpleasant? It had been a couple of hours since he’d been seen, to my knowledge; anything could have happened in that time. 

I knocked again, harder, and when there was still no response I used my spare key- the one that, until now, I’d never used unless expressly instructed to do so- and entered with my heart pounding in my lips and a magical  _ forma _ \- or ‘spell,’ for you mere mortals- already on my lips.

I was greeted by the sight of Thomas Nightingale blinking owlishly at me from the sofa. He was usually a very light sleeper, so the fact I hadn’t woken him with my knocking said all that needed to be said about how much rest he’d managed to get over the past week. He had a thin blanket draped over himself and as he sat it fell down to reveal a now-crumpled light blue shirt. He followed my gaze down and grimaced, trying to straighten out some of the creases. 

He hadn’t spoken yet, but that wasn’t at all unusual when he’d just woken up. I’d once waited two hours until he’d said a single word to me when he hadn’t had access to decent tea or coffee. It wasn’t that he was being intentionally rude or standoffish, but at some point he must have come across the slogan ‘careless talk costs lives’ and taken it more to heart than most people; hardly surprising, I suppose, what with his ‘super secret’ work with the Folly and in the War (yes, the Second World War; no, he wasn’t a decrepit cradle snatcher. As Facebook would say, ‘it’s complicated’). The concept had stuck to such a degree that even now, seventy years after the fact, I’m still not sure what exactly he got up to. He didn’t want to risk saying something incriminating (or, worse, embarrassing) in a sleep addled state. 

Where he lacked in words before breakfast, he more than made up for in casual affection, so I wasn’t complaining at all. He opened his arms to me in invitation and smiled one of his small but strangely heartwarming- if you’re me, anyway, and probably David Mellenby, but I didn’t want to go there right now- smiles. I stayed away for just as long as it took me to flip the switch on the kettle in the kitchette before practically diving onto the sofa with him. He looked briefly surprised by my enthusiasm, but pleased all the same.

It was then that I noticed how cold it was in his flat. That explained the blanket. “It’s freezing in here,” I complained, rubbing at his arm because he was wearing fewer layers than I was and I’m a gentleman like that.

“The heating appears to have broken,” he murmured against my neck, warm breath making me shiver in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room, “I’ll call someone to fix it in the morning.”

The kettle whistled and clicked and I extracted myself with some reluctance to make us tea, because it was cold, Thomas was tired and I was still shaken after my encounter. As any proper Englishman or woman will tell you, tea is a sworn cure for all such ills and more. I made his- medium strength with a dash of milk- and my own- in this instance, more milk than strictly necessary and two sugars, because I’d had a fright and, hey, I’m not diabetic  yet. 

Thomas didn’t comment on the fact I’d made the tea in the mismatched mugs I’d smuggled into the flat rather than using his fancy tea service; I still worried that I might break something every time I so much as breathed near that thing. I swear I’d seen one like it on Antiques Roadshow when I couldn’t be bothered to turn the tele off at my mum’s after Sunday lunch. He accepted the drink gratefully and patted my side for the effort. I think he’d been aiming for my rear but, as I said, he was clearly very tired. 

“How’ve you been?” he asked, after a few sips had miraculously- or perhaps magically, now there’s a thought- enlivened him.

Before today, that wouldn’t have been a vexed question at all. Now, however… I’d already hesitated for too long and he frowned at me, looking more awake by the second. “I missed you,” I admitted, because soppy and unmanly though the sentiment might have been, it was true. Now it was between him, me and Toby, and I thought I could cope with that.

He gave me a soft look and raised his hand- warmed by the tea mug- to cup my cheek. “I missed you too. I’ll tell you what happened- it’s not been an uneventful week- and I hope to hear all about your new building project, but for now…” there was a touch of self-deprecation in his smile, “would you object to us going straight to bed?”

At any other time I might have waggled my eyebrows suggestively and commented on how ‘I wasn’t that kind of boy’, but I knew what he meant and at that moment I wanted nothing more than to curl up with him under his duvet, in silence, preferably before I could get the chance to let my tongue run away with me and confess to everything. I like to think that I wouldn’t have made an entirely inept criminal, but I’d certainly make a very guilty sounding suspect and I’d gone and hitched up with a former DCI, no less.

Willing as I was to go to bed, I got the impression that sleep would be a long time coming.


	4. Chapter 4

I was right: while Thomas had fallen asleep quickly, half draped across me, I had only been able to stare up at the ceiling, stroking idly at his arm, clad in an old fashioned pyjama top (he’d given me a matching set for Christmas, I was wearing them, too- they were surprisingly comfortable). 

Sometimes Thomas still dreamed about David Mellenby. I’d heard him shout his name in his sleep on several occasions, and I could tell that they were nightmares. Sometimes I felt glad that this was the case, a petty, jealous part of me absolutely not wanting him to have good dreams about another man, but I always felt guilty for those momentary lapses into caveman possessiveness. 

David Charter Mellenby was born on the 14th April 1900 in the Dorset village of Affpuddle located, as if it wasn’t already titled unfortunately enough, in the Piddle Valley. Aside from apparently being named by Roald Dahl, the village also has the honour of looking exactly like an American tourist’s dream of ye olde English idyll, all thatched roofs and drizzle. Mr and Mrs Mellenby were similarly quaint and respectable: the Anglican vicar of the village’s Norman church and the daughter of a naval bigwig (or, more probably, ‘bighat’). 

The couple’s eldest child and daughter having suffered from the frequently fatal affliction of being a Victorian, David was raised as an only child and presumably had a grand old time doing whatever Edwardian children did before being packed off to boarding school at the tender age of eleven. There he was discovered to have a certain ‘scientific bent’ and, his not having been a traditional school, an aptitude for magic.

Posh white boys being the charming and considerate creatures that they were then, are now and shall be forever (world without end, Amen) soon gave him a nickname: 'The Cuckoo.' This epithet served a dual purpose that no doubt had many spotty faces creasing up with mirth: Mellenby was a scientist in a magical school (a cuckoo in a nest of… whatever cuckoos usually inhabit the nests of. Not fellow cuckoos, in any case); he was also considered to be barking, and so the  _ hilarious _  ornithological moniker stuck. 

Mellenby, not happy to sit back and let magic do its thing uncharted, started doing some serious research into how and why it worked. After the Second World War, he began to publish a series of papers explaining the workings of magic to people outside of the magical community in the hopes that wider understanding and openness would decrease the likelihood that it could be used to commit the same atrocities that it had under the Nazis. The Folly all but shunned him afterwards, but he won several scientific awards and was even granted an honorary doctorate from the University of Durham.

All this I’d learnt from the internet. That he died on the 2nd December 1972 in London ‘by his own hand’ (though I suspect with the aid of poison / gun / rope /  magic), I learned from Thomas Nightingale, and from Mellenby’s headstone. We’d visited his grave together on the anniversaries of his birth and his death, and I could tell that Thomas had been touched when I’d offered to come. He’d ‘introduced’ me to David, at my insistence, and though he’d clearly felt awkward doing it, his steps as he walked back to the car had seemed lighter than they had on the way through the graveyard. 

Thomas never gave me any cause to think that he compared me unfavourably with David- though several times he had commented, wryly, when my desire to provide a scientific answer for everything reminded him of his former… friend. Still, how could I compete? David Mellenby was  _ David Mellenby _ . If there had been a picture of him somewhere available for printing, I’d have had it on my wall at university, and probably afterwards if I’m honest. Everything I knew about magic before meeting Thomas, I knew from his writing. 

It wasn’t just that the man was a genius, he’d also been with Thomas for longer than I’d been alive, their relationship having been the cause of ‘The Shunning, The Sequel: This Time it’s Homophobic.’ Though he was often hazy about the details and I tried not to pry (often more for the sake of my own ego than to spare his feelings) I knew that they’d been at school together and in the Sixth Form had ‘experimented’ with what were, at the time, extremely illegal acts, though not at all uncommon in a boys’ boarding school. From that point on, they were inseparable, barely apart for more than a few months at a stretch; until Mellenby’s death, of course.

Thomas had become a virtual recluse afterwards, distancing himself from everything else he had known and loved until, mysteriously, he started aging backwards. This reflection brought me to another: if David Mellenby had been in his seventies when he died, how was it that I had been speaking to a ghost claiming to be him- and I had no reason to doubt that it was- but which was a good thirty years younger than it ought to have been? Every other ghost I’d met, and I’d had more than my quota, had been exactly as they were at the moment of death, giving a whole new meaning to my mum’s insistence that I always wear clean underwear ‘in case I get hit by a bus.'

I was broken out of my brooding by Thomas murmuring a name. It was mine, and there was no doubt that  _ this _ dream was a happy one. I fell into a peaceful sleep after that; I think that says something about my psyche that I’m none-too-proud about. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two chapters today- call it a Friday treat. Another coming up tomorrow.
> 
> I just re-read 'Changes of Perspective' and feel I probably ought to apologise that this isn't even vaguely in the same league, quality wise. We'll just have to live in hope that Sixthlight might write an official sequel!
> 
> Until then, excessively long sentences await you...

Several months ago, Thomas had asked me if I wanted to move in with him- either into his flat or elsewhere, whichever I preferred. I’d declined, saying that I didn’t want to leave Jaget in the lurch. Thomas had been stung, I could tell, but he hadn’t tried to argue me out of my position, instead praising me, unduly, for being a ‘fine friend and flatmate.’ Unintentional though it probably was, especially since Thomas hadn’t his morning dose of caffeine at that point, somehow the alliteration made that compliment even worse, especially since I knew I was being a ‘lousy lover and loser.’

I was insecure, and it had nothing at all to do with anything Thomas had said or done, and everything to do with the fact that, even if I hadn’t encountered the literal, if metaphysical, person of David Mellenby on that January night, his ghost had still loomed large before then.

Saturday dawned, though the sun didn’t seem to have got the memo. Thomas’s flat was now even colder than it had been the night before, and it was the cold that woke me. Thomas was awake, too, and gave me a wry look, “sorry about this. It was working just fine when I left.”

It was always pretty endearing when he was bashful, and I decided to take pity on him, even if I did rest my cold foot against his calf. He didn’t yelp too loudly. “Well, I suppose we could get warm by other means?” The ‘other means’ proved very effective, though perhaps more awkward than they might have been had we shed all of our clothes. Still, there are some places that you really don’t want to risk being frostbitten.

As we draped out on the bed afterwards- still under both the duvet and the blanket from the living room- and caught our breath, it misted in front of our eyes. We shared a despairing look, neither of us wanting to be the first to make a break for the bathroom. Toby whined at the door and then nudged it open with his nose, coming to join us under the covers. Thomas tutted and accused me of being a bad influence on him, but he wasn’t a tyrant and didn’t attempt to banish him.

“So how was Father Thames?” Thomas had been called out at his request to help with a matter that was possibly uncanny and definitely unfortunate. Last I heard, wood nymphs may or may not have been involved.

Thomas frowned, “actually, it was the strangest thing. Father Thames was just fine and couldn’t recall having requested my services at all, though he did admit that he’s been a touch forgetful of late.”

“Well, at his age…” Thomas shot me a reproachful look.

“Age has little to do with it, in this case. He merely has more business to attend to in the wake of the New River Agreement.” Not the most exciting name, I always thought- I’d have at least gone with something along the lines of ‘The Thames Treaty’, but who was I to judge? “In any case, I was in fact able to make myself useful arbitrating some border disputes. With the ways the tributaries are changing these days there was more than enough work to do to make my trip worthwhile.”

I snorted and he frowned. “It’s a little strange, don’t you think?” I offered by way of explanation, “that he’d have forgotten summoning you.”

Thomas was looking pensive and my stomach began to knot uncomfortably, “perhaps. I had considered that maybe a third party might have lured me out for some nefarious purpose,” my eyes widened and he took hold of my arm, “but I assure you, I took every necessary precaution and I was in no danger. It was merely a case of… well, frankly, with all that has happened with the Folly and our flagitious Mr Sutton, I may well have become a touch paranoid of late.”

I slid my arm out of his grip and took his hand in mine. He’d sounded ashamed, and that needed to be stopped right away. “Hey, listen- I’d be worried if you weren’t paranoid at the moment. Just… I wish you’d called me if you thought there was something going on. I know I’m not much use, magically speaking, but…”

I was kissed, quite thoroughly, before Thomas spoke again, “everybody needs to start somewhere and you’re by no means useless, Peter, merely easily distracted.”

Well, I had to grin at that. “That’s not something you usually complain about…” I trailed a hand down his side and he swatted me off. He was smiling, though, which dulled the blow. In the bright(ish) light of day, it was easy to brush last night’s ‘incident’ off as a hallucination brought on by too many sleepless nights and an overly active imagination.

Still, aside from the obvious, there were one or two things about this particular hallucination / haunting / whatever the hell it was that still bothered me, and I’d never not let curiosity get the better of me to date. “What _are_ ghosts?” I didn’t realise I’d spoken aloud until I noticed Thomas’s nonplussed expression. Well, that could certainly have gone better.

I cleared my throat and tried again. “I mean… are they the ‘tormented souls of the damned,’”  I’d read that somewhere and certainly hoped it wasn’t the case, especially given the identity of this particular ‘soul’, “or… you know… something else. Like animated _vestigia_ ,” this didn’t seem to work, either. I couldn’t think of any reason Mellenby’s essence would be tied to that location.

Thomas frowned, and I could see that he wanted to respond to my question with one of his own, but I was saved from having to explain myself right away by his impeccable manners. “Nobody’s quite sure. General consensus is that, yes, they’re similar to _vestigia_ in that they’re imprints that the departed have left behind. Echos which generally tell of a particularly tragic demise,” well, that much seemed to fit, but…

“So can ghosts only be that, then? Recordings… sort of… of how someone was when they died? People can’t… leave impressions at other moments, when they’re still alive? Like… like answerphone messages.” Yes, I know, that was a terrible analogy- but I was clutching at straws.

There was a thoughtful pause which, again, I suspected I had manners to thank for. “Not to my knowledge. There has been some research into the possibility that vestigium might be able to translate into something that might be observed rather than merely heard, smelt or tasted. Perhaps even touched. I know David was particularly interested in a phenomenon he referred to as ‘ _tangible vestigium_ ,’ but I’m not sure he ever got too far with that research.”

I think I might have stopped breathing, “David Mellenby researched ghosts?”

Thomas’s frown deepened, “yes. He researched many things of that ilk but… Peter, what is this all about? What have you seen?”

I’d dug myself a nice, big hole and now all I wanted was to curl up and hide in it. No such luck. “I… there was a ghost, or something, at a building site but I… I got the impression he was older than he looked.”

“Interesting,” that politeness again. It’s a killer. “Did you speak with him, this… possible ghost?” I nodded and Thomas continued, “well then. If he seems amiable enough, I think perhaps there might be a simple way to confirm your suspicions. _Ask him_.”


	6. Chapter 6

_This is a really, really bad idea_ , was the mantra that ran through my head as I made my way back towards University College on Monday evening. I still kept going, however, because I’ve never been known to let a bad idea stop me. It wasn’t as if I had anything better to do with my time, and I had a ghost-at-a-guess to hunt.

Thomas had come down with a cold, hardly surprising since his heating still hadn’t been fixed, rendering his flat an arctic wasteland. Between sneezes, he’d taken pains to inform me that a) it wasn’t possible to catch a cold just by being cold and b) with him not being an actual Austen heroine, it was hardly a serious matter and I need not fuss. Still, I did feel duty bound to fuss just a little, especially since he’d looked as pathetic as I’d ever seen him, red nosed and bleary eyed. I’d tucked him up in bed with several extra blankets and a hot water bottle I’d borrowed from Lesley before heading out to collude with a former corpse.

Now, ‘ghost summoning’ not being something that’s included in a standard comprehensive education, I was at a bit of a loss as to what I should do when I actually arrived. I decided that my best bet was probably to retrace my steps and so I found myself on my knees once again, having a good old time with some stone. I got another whack of some very interesting _vestigium_ , just as I had the first time I had been here, but I wasn’t really paying attention to that. Instead I was waiting for… whatever I was waiting for.

In a basement flat of mine and Nightingale’s building, there resides the creepiest woman I’ve ever come across (if, indeed, she is actually a woman and not ‘something else’- the jury’s still out on that one). Not only is Molly ‘creepy’ in the usual sense, but she’s also an expert at ‘creeping,’ often managing to sneak up on an unsuspecting neighbour without so much as an audible footstep for warning. Long exposure to her alone was probably what saved me from a premature heart attack as I turned and saw David Mellenby standing directly behind me.

I jumped slightly, and he looked contrite, rubbing at his neck again before speaking. “I’m terribly sorry, dear fellow. I was merely intrigued as to what might have garnered such a depth of concentrated study.” Or, in the language of my modern London brethren, ‘Oi! Wot you lookin’ at?’

“I’m just…” I motioned to the foundations, “you know.” Mellenby nodded in a fine display of knowing exactly what I was talking about, not giving anything away about how he clearly must be talking to a lunatic. Did he learn that level of social nicety from Thomas, did Thomas learn that from him, or was everyone just ridiculously urbane in ye olden days?

I stood up and brushed myself off. “Actually, it was you I came to see. I wanted to apologise for the other day. To... explain.”

The ghost regarded me with sharp eyes. “From what I can extrapolate from observations of modern technology and automobiles, I must have been dead for at least twenty years. And yet Thomas Nightingale is your Master?” I flinched at the term. Old habits die hard.

“More like forty years,” I said as gently as I could manage, “but yeah, Thomas has been teaching me.”

Mellenby looked incredulous, as well he might, “but that would make him… he must be coming up for…”

“He’ll be one hundred and sixteen this July,” I said, and saying it out loud I almost couldn’t believe it myself. I could tell from Mellenby’s expression that he was considering all sorts of scenarios involving a very, _very_ old man and decided to put him out of his misery. I took my phone out of my pocket and scrolled through my photos until I found a good one of Thomas.

I didn’t hold the phone out right away, feeling I probably ought to explain the situation- as best I could, anyway- before I showed him. “It’s… complicated. He doesn’t know why it happened, and if he doesn’t I don’t think anyone does, but, soon after…” I cleared my throat, “in his seventies, he started to age backwards. Now he’s-” I showed Mellenby the image on the screen.

For several seconds there was no response. I didn’t realise ghosts could cry, but there did seem to be a certain moistness to Mellenby’s cheeks. It was hard to tell; the tears were as insubstantial as the rest of him. “How extraordinary,” he whispered, with a definite hitch to his voice. On instinct, he stretched out a hand to take hold of my phone and get a closer look, but before he reached it he realised his mistake and let his arm fall away.

“And he’s…” Mellenby began after a few moments of silence “Thomas, is he well?”

“He has a bit of a cold at the moment,” I answered, though I knew that wasn’t really the question. I paused, deciding I should actually take some time to consider my words for once. “It was hard for him- what happened. He doesn’t exactly talk about it a lot, but you can tell. But he’s… better. Now.”

I thought of all the things I could say: about Thomas’s relationship with the Folly, the rift that formed after Mellenby’s death; about his important and respected role within the demi monde; about how he’d recently taken on some jobs as a police consultant, sometimes with me by his side; about our relationship, and how much we meant to each other. How proud I was to be his apprentice and how bloody ecstatic I was to be his boyfriend. Instead, being the sophisticated, sensitive and metrosexual man I am, I supplied the most important piece of information of all, “he’s got a dog.”

Even if he’d wanted to give me the smack I probably deserved, his manners prevented him (and his incorporeal form, but I think the manners were the real clinchers). Instead, his features did something complicated before his mouth finally set into a wry smile. “How are people taking it, these days?”

“Well, quite a lot of people have pets and Toby’s…” Mellenby had his arms crossed by now. I recognised _that_ expression, too. I took a breath and just about refrained from rubbing my own neck and possibly adding further insult to serious injury. “There’s the odd idiot, there always will be, but the idiots are on the wrong side of the law, now. We can even get married, you know, if he wants to…” It felt strange to be discussing this with David Mellenby- Thomas’s late and very much lamented lover- especially given that I hadn’t even had the balls to discuss long term plans with _him_ yet.

I hadn’t met Mellenby’s eyes for some time, and when I did I expected him to look ‘distinctly miffed’ in one form or other. What he actually looked was relieved. I was startled, and I think it must have showed because he started to chuckle. “Dear boy, don’t look so surprised. Do you think that I wanted Thomas to suffer? I’m glad he found someone with whom to share his life… this miraculous second life you’ve described…”

Well, if he wasn’t going to do miffed, I could give it a good enough go for the both of us. “If you didn’t want him to suffer, why did you do what you did? Not really any surer way to ensure it, from where I’m standing.” I crossed my own arms, because no more Mr Nice Architect.

Mellenby grimaced and spread his hands, “I had no choice.”

I probably looked a bit like a goldfish, eyes bulging out of head, mouth open, but I was far too pissed to worry about appearances. “Of course you had a choice! You did it to yourself! Sure, you were under a lot of pressure, but so was Thomas. You could have just talked to him instead of…” but, all of a sudden, I was found that I was talking to air. David Mellenby was gone.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The fluff before the storm...

A two-day meeting in Birmingham ( _the horror_ ) meant that I didn’t see Thomas again until Wednesday evening. We texted before then, though, and his perfectly grammatical messages seemed cheerful enough. Alone in the hotel, I was so bored that I seriously considered introducing him to the joys of the sext, but the appeal wore off when I imagined him writing back in perfect iambic pentameter. That definitely sounded like something he’d do.

After parking the Asbo just about legally, I headed up the stairs at a run then paused outside Thomas’s door to catch my breath so I didn’t appear overeager. He opened the door soon after I knocked and I must have looked sufficiently alarmed by his appearance because he rolled his eyes at me. “I know what you’re going to say. It’s a cold. I’m _fine_.”

I grinned, “and hello to you, too.”

Colour rose to Thomas’s otherwise far-too-pale-for-my-liking face. “Good evening, Peter, I apologise…” he took a step towards me and pulled me into an inelegant embrace. I patted his bum to reassure him that I hadn’t taken his brief lapse in etiquette to heart. Pulling back, I took the opportunity to raise the back of my hand to his forehead; he didn’t have a fever, at least. If anything he was too cold.

“They still haven’t sorted your boiler? You’re going to catch pneumonia down here, you know. Why don’t you come up to mine? Jaget won’t mind.”

Thomas shook his head and reversed until he was sat down on the sofa, “I wouldn’t want to impose.” He wouldn’t be ‘imposing’, not at all, but there was little sense in trying to convince him. He was a literal Victorian, and very set in his ways about certain things.

I sat down beside him and so did Toby. He was lucky, he had plenty of fur to keep him warm. Thomas was shivering, though he tried to disguise it. I wrapped the blanket around him and joined him under it, sliding an arm around his back for good measure. He arched an eyebrow at me, but I could see his lips twitching.

“How was your meeting?” I groaned, and his lips twitched further, “that good?”

“Well, it was good for my Pliny. Had bugger all else to do in the hotel last night.”

Thomas sidled slightly closer to me, “and what, precisely, would you rather have done instead?”

I was about to demonstrate when the moment was broken by a loud sneeze. I laughed, saw how mortified Thomas was, and laughed some more. I never claimed to be kind.


	8. Chapter 8

University College London was founded in 1826 with the express purposes of creating a liberal and forward thinking institution and, more importantly, of being neither Oxford nor Cambridge. William Wilkins, the architect who designed the university’s main building off Gower Street, apparently missed the memo about this brave new world and decided instead to make his design look as ancient as possible- all Graeco-Roman columns and plinths. Neoclassical facade aside, the university also boasts several grand red brick buildings, built with the full resonance of Victorian menace, and several examples in the brutalist 50s and 60s styles which stand as looming grey reminders of the Cold War: the time that common-sense and ascetic decency forgot. 

It was one of these buildings, close to the shiny new University College Hospital site, which had been destroyed to reveal ‘structures of archaeological interest’ beneath. And so my firm’s plans had had to be put on hold while Time Team did their thing and, as I was both senior enough to act as a company liaison and junior enough to be given grunt work, I was tasked with acting as go-between. This meant that I had to return with fair frequency to the site of my recent haunting, but generally speaking these meetings didn’t occur during the dead of night and that was just fine by me.

In general, I’m not the sort to hold a grudge. It’s not that I’m above such things, just that I’m too easily distracted. When it comes to the select group of people I care about, however, I’m fairly sure I could give someone the cold shoulder indefinitely if they hurt them. I might not have said the words ‘I love you’ to Thomas yet, but I had taken to glaring daggers at our obscenely massive neighbour, Alex Seawoll, retired policeman turned full time grumpy northerner, whenever he dared to say anything even remotely derogatory to him, and that’s about as demonstrative as I get. 

David Mellenby’s death had upset Thomas Nightingale more than any other event in his extremely long life that I was aware of, and so I thought it prudent that I hold a grievance against the man responsible: namely, David Mellenby. Being British, I did this as passive aggressively as possible and, since our last encounter, had been actively avoiding the area around Warren Street during the hours of darkness which, given the limited length of your average winter day, meant a fair bit of schedule reshuffling. But no petty act of revenge is too inconvenient in the name of the man I love.

Though I kept this up for several weeks, during that period I hadn’t actually seen much of the man whose honour I was so pointedly avoiding defending. Thomas had been asked by Inspector Lewis- detective, wizard and unregistered magical mentor to one Sergeant Sahra Guleed- for a consult on a series of missing persons cases. These being naturally time sensitive, Thomas had been out a lot during the evenings, so we hadn’t spent more than a couple of hours together at a stretch in close to a month, and had spent most of that precious time together in bed- for one reason or another. If I had seen him more, and if we had had time for magic lessons, I would have been worried about more than the possibility of these cases being somehow linked to Sutton and his particular brand of macabre psychopathy. 

I wasn’t so unobservant that I didn’t notice that Thomas had developed a nasty cough, but I knew that he was prone to chest infections so I wasn’t surprised. As a result of a couple of ‘minor altercations,’ as he put it, involving people with guns- one during the war and one on the streets of London- Thomas had a jagged scar on his flank and a neater one on his back, just below his right shoulder blade. The latter was caused by a bullet that punctured his lung and left tissue damage which refused to heal even as the rest of him aged in reverse. Not unexpected though it might have been to hear him hacking up the remaining lung, I still extracted a promise from Thomas that he would go and visit Dr Walid- world renowned, possibly world’s sole cryptopathologist and the only man with a medical degree to be permitted within a ten meter radius of Thomas Nightingale’s person. 

His heating still wasn’t working. The engineers had been around on several occasions but had left scratching their heads each time, the cause of the fault a mystery which seemed set to remain unresolved no matter what shiny new parts they attempted to fix to the boiler. 

Thomas takes stoicism to the level of an artform, but even so, I should have seen. I should have noticed how cold he was to touch, far colder than even the frigid temperature of his flat would account for; should have put his pale face and the dark circles under his eyes down to more than long hours and the strain of the case; should have noticed that the atypical disarray in his flat was not due to his frequent absences and but because bending to pick things up made him dizzy; should have seen that he wasn’t letting me walk Toby for him to make me feel useful, but because he didn’t have the energy to do it himself. I should have seen all of these things- but I didn’t.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another two chapter day. Yesterday's writing session was surprisingly productive!
> 
> This is the longest solo fic I've ever written, and I'm not quite finished yet, so it would be difficult to overstate how wonderful feedback would be! (Basically, if you could see your way to commenting, I will love you forever.) 
> 
> And now, over to Peter...

A bleak February faded into an only slightly brighter March. I’d had a long day of back and forths between the office and the UCL site, and wanted nothing more than to veg out on the sofa with a cool beer in my hand and the football on the tele. _Bliss_.

I toed off my shoes, stepped into the soft leather slippers Thomas had bought me to go with the pyjama set and picked up my post from the sideboard in the hall, flicking through it idly as I made my way through the living room and into the kitchenette: spam, spam, ‘not a circular,’ heating and electricity bill, reminder from the dentist… I plucked a beer out of the fridge and made a beeline for the sofa.

If I’d been less distracted, I would have noticed that I was not alone. As it was, I sat down, put my feet up on the coffee table and was just about to reach for the remote when there was a voice behind me. “Good evening, Mr Grant.”

It was a good thing that the beer was unopened, or Jaget would have been pissed. As it was, I jumped a mile, spun around and swung at- whoever- with the bottle. Before I could hit them, I was disarmed with surprising efficiency given both the speed of the reaction and the fact that the man doing the disarming was dead.

I gaped stupidly at David Mellenby as he placed the bottle down on the side table. There was a lot to process, and I’d had a shock, so that was among the great many very interesting, significant and downright weird things that I didn’t quite get around to thinking about until later. Instead, I asked the first question that came to my mind: “how did you know my name?” As I said, I’d had a shock.

Mellenby looked amused. He motioned to the post in my hand, all addressed to Mr P. Grant. Right. Well… “how did you know where I live?”

That neck rub again. I still wasn’t sure whether that was a habit that had formed in life or in the afterlife. “I’m afraid I thought that, given the circumstances, it might be prudent for me to follow you home.”

My brain finally catching up with a few things, several questions occurred to me at once: what circumstances? How had he followed me? How could he be sure that Thomas wouldn’t see him? What if Thomas had seen him? _Had_ Thomas seen him? Instead of asking any of these, however, I went for: “but I thought ghosts were tied to a particular locale?”

Mellenby blinked, my line of questioning apparently surprising him as much as it did myself. “Generally speaking that seems to be so, but as I’m sure you’ve concluded by now, this is quite an irregular case.” I followed his gaze to the bottle on the side table. The bottle he had taken from me. The bottle he had _held_ in his actual _hand_.

“Shit, you’re alive!” I am, as has been pointed out to and by me on various occasions, very easily distracted. This counts double when I’m in an unfamiliar situation- and they didn’t get much more unfamiliar than this. “I could have killed you…” and for a moment that’s all I could imagine, myself having accidentally bottled my partner’s ‘sort of ex, I guess’ back to death on Jaget’s rug.

Shaking his head, Mellenby gave me a sympathetic look. “I am still as dead as ever I was. There is no pulse of life within me, and yet I have found myself to be solidifying in matter over the past several weeks.”

His speech pattern was surprisingly archaic for someone who had been around until the 70s, but Thomas’s went a bit like that too when he was unsettled. When in doubt, revert to how you communicated as a kid. I do it as well, but where I resorted to tense shoulder shrugging and monosyllables in a pinch, Mellenby apparently cracked out the ‘ye verilies.’

“And that’s not the least of it. Try as I may, for many weeks I could not begin to fathom how or why I came to be in that particular area, at this particular time. I cannot recall ever having been in the vicinity before during my earthly life, and I have been there for a matter of months, apparently having had a fairly peaceful rest before that point. And now I appear as I was when I was young; and I _remember_.”

The emphasis he placed on that last word and the slight mist it brought to his eyes made me frown. “You remember dying?” I mean, I didn’t know for sure- there weren’t many people around to ask about it, after all- but I’d hazard a guess that remembering your own death might be a little upsetting.

Mellenby shook his head, “I remember _everything_ , with perfect clarity, that occurred in the lead up to my death. And it shouldn’t be possible- should be as impossible as it is for me to appear here in the body of a forty year old man- because at the time of my death there were days when I could barely remember my own name.”

The tears that ran down his cheeks were not insubstantial now and if I hadn’t been frozen in place I might have tried to comfort him, or at least offered him a tissue. He began to murmur something, words that I thought I recognised but couldn’t quite place, “ _for now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I shall know even as also I am known._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mellenby's quote at the end comes from 1 Corinthians 13:12 (King James Version, if you're interested in such things)


	10. Chapter 10

It took a while, probably longer than it should have, but a few things finally began to click into place. “Does this have something to do with why you… you know? You were losing your memory?”

Mellenby dabbed at his face with a hanky and made an indecisive gesture with his head which was somewhere between a nod and a shake. “I was losing _myself_. The Folly was relentless in its questioning: did I know Albert Woodville-Gentle? Yes, he had been my apprentice. Was I aware of his activities? No, I was not. This I know; _now_ I know. But when they started making suggestions about what I might have known, about my possible involvement with Albert’s experiments, all the vile things he had done… I found that I couldn’t say for sure that I hadn’t been somehow complicit. All of my recollections were hazy- even details from a few hours before could only be grasped at like the remnants of a dream before fading away. Then they started asking about Thomas, saying that he, too, must have been involved.”

He shook his head emphatically, brown eyes bright with fearsome intellect and righteous indignation, even while the remembered pain remained. “I’d have died before unwittingly compromising him.”

And so he had, I realised.

“You had no choice,” I quoted his own words back to him. I had been so sure on our last meeting that his decision had been cowardly, at best, and selfishly uncaring at worst. Though I still thought there must have been a less painful route, I could only imagine how difficult that choice must have been to make. I tried to put myself in his place, imagining what it might be like to feel like a burden my partner. Waking in the morning unable to remember his name. I shuddered at the thought. And that was without the real danger that Thomas might have been arrested, or ‘disappeared’, because of something Mellenby had said in error. Perhaps it really had been kinder this way.

My mouth was dry and my eyes stung, throat working around the guilty lump that had lodged there. Mellenby regarded me closely and smiled sadly. He had a nice smile and his cheeks dimpled in a way that was oddly charming; I couldn’t fault Thomas’s taste. He sighed and massaged the back of his neck, frowning thoughtfully as he did so. Then he grimaced and pulled his hand away. “But there are more important things at stake now than the past. Tell me, how is Thomas?”

Surprised by this apparent non-sequitur, I responded with hasty thoughtlessness, “he’s fi-” And then I paused, frowned, and felt the creeping tendrils of dread begin to take hold. “Why?” I had to ask, but I didn’t think I’d like the answer.

Mellenby shook his head firmly, “all will be made clear, but it really is imperative that you tell me how he is.”

I didn’t dive right in this time, instead pausing to think what the answer might be. The longer I thought, the more dread tightened its grip. “He had a cold, and now a cough- quite a bad one. He’s not been… himself. I haven’t seen him a lot lately,” and now that I said it I felt sick with shame, “but he was very tired. Distracted. He… minimises symptoms” I remembered Abdul accusing him of that, “must have been feeling pretty bad to let even that much show.”

Mellenby nodded slowly as if I had only confirmed a theory. “And his magic?”

My eyes widened as I realised I hadn’t seen him cast as much as a werelight in months. “I… he hasn’t… we haven’t had time for lessons and… it’s been so cold in his flat, that…” I floundered, trying and failing to come up with some excuse for not having noticed this before.

With a motion so swift I wondered if a ghost could give himself whiplash, Mellenby’s head shot up so that our eyes met, “cold?”

Again, I was taken aback by the question. I took a breath, “yeah, his heating’s packed it in and no one’s been able to figure out what’s wrong with it.”

Mellenby swore with such fluency that I would have been impressed if I hadn’t been so terrified. “What is it? What does all this mean?”

“It means,” Mellenby said slowly, “that I shall have to call in on Thomas.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A bit of a short bridge chapter today. Peter's attempts at being practical made him wander off down the wrong corridor, but he'll be heading in the right direction again tomorrow.
> 
> As ever, comments are very, VERY greatly appreciated.

Now I wouldn’t say that I’m a cynical man, but I could already see several reasons why this plan was a Really Bad Idea.

Before we headed downstairs to Thomas’s flat, I knocked on my neighbours’ door. Fortunately, it was Lesley who answered rather than Beverley or I’d have been there all night trying to explain. “Peter…” she saw David and frowned, “and who’s this?”  
  
“Lesley, David; David, Lesley,” her frown deepened as she looked David up and down, clearly noticing that there was something odd about him but not quite being able to put her finger on what it was. I spoke again before she could ask any more questions, “listen, you’ve had first aid training, right?”

Her face was now so creased that I almost warned her that the wind might change and leave her stuck like that. “Y-es…” she responded suspiciously.

That was a relief, though I’d suspected she must have. Lesley was back with the police (and now also a fellow unsanctioned magical practitioner in training) after a spell on medical leave in which she managed a chemist. Both of these jobs would have required at least a bit of a go on one of those resuscitation dolls, I’d reckoned. “Great… and do you know what to do about heart attacks?”

Her eyes widened in alarm, but at least she’d stopped frowning, “Peter! Who’s… where are they?” she reached behind her for her keys, ready to rush out in her dressing gown to help whatever poor sod needed it.

I put a hand on her shoulder to stop her, “no- no one’s had one. It’s just… humour me, alright? It’s complicated, and I don’t know what’s going on myself, but I’ll explain if you just…” I took a breath, feeling like I might be in need of some first aid myself pretty soon.  “Can you just keep your phone on you for the next hour or so, and come down to Thomas’s flat if I call?”

Lesley had seen Thomas more than I had, recently, it being her team he was liaising with, and I wasn’t especially comforted by the fact she looked less shocked now rather than more. “You take good care of him,” she instructed, “and don’t let you give you any crap about being ‘fine.’” She was on to him too, then? I wasn’t surprised, though I felt even more guilty for having apparently been so blind.

“I won’t. Thanks. See you later, Lesley.” I turned to leave.

“Much later, I hope!” Lesley called after me and shut the door.

Mellenby didn’t comment, but I thought he looked a bit less tense. I know I’d relaxed, a little at least, in the knowledge that at least one of the worst case scenarios had been covered.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tomorrow's going to be a little hectic and I'm not sure whether I'll be able to get a chapter up, so have it now instead.
> 
> Reviews, prompts, requests, hints, tips and knock knock jokes all appreciated. Comments make me unreasonably happy.

We heard Thomas before we saw him. The sound of his cough through the door made us both grimace. I turned to Mellenby, “how do we do this?” My hands were shaking slightly, palms damp. I stuffed my fists into my pockets.

“I’ll wait out here,” Mellenby suggested, “it’s best if you speak with him first,” he made a vague motion to the corridor, “call for me when you need me.”

I didn’t like the fact that I was going to have to explain this on my own, but I could hardly have expected Mellenby to be the one to knock at Thomas’s door. Then we really would have needed Lesley. Instead, he retreated out of sight and I took a deep breath before knocking.

It took him longer than usual to answer and I shifted nervously from foot to foot, rubbing my palms on my jeans. He opened the door and I stopped breathing, something tightening painfully in my chest as I saw how ill he looked. He blinked at me, leaning on the doorframe for support and trying to make it look casual, “Peter, are you quite alright?”

That did it. I laughed, slightly, and it sounded hollow even to me. “Better than you. Come on, back to the sofa.” I took hold of his arm and for once he didn’t resist my help. His arm was thinner than it should have been under the sleeve of his cashmere jumper.

He sat on the sofa and sighed. Toby whined. I almost whined myself. “I should have talked to you about...” he motioned to himself, “Abdul’s been doing tests but he can’t figure out what the matter is with me any more than the chaps who’ve come in about the boiler can work out what ails it.” He was clearly attempting a joke, I didn’t smile.

“We think the two things might be linked,” I told him. Though, technically, my input had been moderate to non-existent on the linking front.

Thomas started, slightly, “ _we_? You’ve been speaking with Dr Walid?” His tone was mild enough by anyone else’s standards, but knowing him as I did I knew he was outraged at the prospect.

I shook my head, “no. Err…” I shifted and took a breath, “me and David Mellenby.”

“What…?” Thomas was so confused that he didn’t even stop to correct my grammar, “what do you mean? His papers?” Thomas had given me several of David’s unpublished papers to read and I know it always gave him pleasure to see how reverentially I treated them, even if the content was mostly gibberish to him.

I shook my head and sat down on the sofa next to him, taking his hand. “Look, Thomas… this is… I should probably have told you earlier, but…” I needed to calm down.

Thomas squeezed my hand and looked me directly in the eye, “ _tell me_ , Peter.”

I forced myself to meet his grey eyes, I owed him that much at least. “Ok. Ok… just… hear me out, alright? Whatever you think of me when you’ve heard, hear me out. For your own sake.”

He was tense, but he didn’t pull his hand back or turn his face away from mine. I took a breath.

“In January I went to the building site- the one I’ve told you about- and met a ghost. I met David Mellenby.”

Thomas’s breath hitched, slightly, but otherwise he remained as he was. “Go on,” he instructed as I paused to let him take this in. His voice was steady and I did as he asked.

“Only it wasn’t… he was younger than he should have been. He was your age… well, the age you look. I saw him again, just once more. We spoke. Then tonight… err… he came to my flat.” The fingers under mine were trembling, and I held his hand in both of mine. I looked down, knowing I’d have been unable to go on if I saw his face now. “He’s not… he’s not like a normal ghost, Thomas. He’s as solid as me or you. Something strange has been happening, and he needs to speak to you.”

There was a sound that was so unexpected that it took me a while to recognise the source. I had never seen Thomas cry, not really, and had certainly never heard him make any sounds that so suspiciously resembled sobs. It shouldn’t have surprised me- I knew he was human and far from heartless- but still, I was shocked to see tears rolling down his cheeks.

“He’s… he’s here?” he wiped at his face with his free hand and looked around falteringly, both hopeful and afraid.

I shook my head and smiled slightly, surprised to find my own cheeks damp. I don’t do tears, either. “No, he’s waiting in the corridor. Do you… is it alright if I get him?”

Thomas opened his mouth to reply and then shut it again firmly. I could see him wavering between the two possibilities. Safely outside the door, David Mellenby was Schrödinger’s cat: real and unreal; alive and dead. As soon as he crossed the threshold, he was a reality- and whatever appearances would suggest, the reality would still be that he was dead.

I started to backtrack, “look, it’s alright. I’m sure there’s some way we can do this so you don’t actually have to…”

He squeezed my hand and silenced me, “no. No… I’ll… I’ll get the door. Would you mind making some tea? The china, I think, if you don’t mind.”

I knew why I was being sent away and I hesitated. “ _Please_ , Peter.”

Looking him in the eye then, I knew that I loved him more than I thought I’d ever manage to love anyone. I’d never been much of a romantic and, if I’m honest, most of my previous relationships had been founded on lust alone-- but this was not a sexy setting. This was me, sat in a freezing cold ex-council flat with Thomas Nightingale’s icy hand in mine, his face damp and smudged with tears and exhaustion and his expression resolute, like the soldier he had been. I bent forward so that our foreheads touched; he leant in and closed his eyes. “I love you,” I whispered, and they shot open again.

He looked surprised, at first, perhaps a little wary, but then his shoulders relaxed and his lips twitched slightly. “I know,” he replied.

I stared at him stupidly for a moment before I saw the look in his eyes- the same one I’d seen before he’d set a bloody raincloud loose on me- and I knew I’d been had. I should have known it was a mistake to introduce him to Star Wars. “You…”

He silenced me extremely effectively with a firm kiss and then pushed me away lightly, his free hand on my chest, “Peter...” I nodded and rose, heading for the kitchenette.

Before I reached it I turned, watching as Thomas made his way stiffly across the living room, paused, squared his shoulders, took a breath, and headed out of sight into the hallway. Not for the first time, I thought that he really was the bravest man I knew.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Managed to find a little posting time before work, so here you have it... 'When Thomas Met Mellenby... Again.'
> 
> Have I mentioned how much I love comments? 'Cos I do. I'm needy like that.

I occupied myself with the tea making and tried to stop shaking so that I wouldn’t drop the damned china. I jumped when the kettle clicked to signal that it had boiled. I wanted to be able to see what was happening in the hallway, to check if Thomas was alright, but I supposed that the fact I hadn’t heard a shout or a thud would have to satisfy me for the time being.

After taking several deep breaths, I headed through to the living room. Mellenby and Thomas were both sat at the dining table. Nightingale had his hands in his lap, trapped between his knees in a way that suggested he was trying to keep them still, but his face was composed, if far too pale. Mellenby was less settled, at least outwardly, rubbing at his neck as if afraid his head might fall off.

I set the tray down and started to pour. “Thank you, Peter,” Thomas’s voice was steady and I felt proud. Our fingers brushed as I passed him his cup.

Traditional etiquette would probably have suggested that I serve the guest first, but given that the guest was technically a ghost… “Would you like… I mean, can you…?” I floundered a little, but who could blame me? As a child I’d read a book about a tiger who came for tea, but no literature had prepared me for this.

Thomas almost spilt his tea but managed to right the cup just in time. Mellenby eyed the pot warily. “Perhaps. I see no harm in trying. Thank you, Mr Grant.” I poured for him with both hands, the second to stop the first from trembling.

“Err, you’re under no obligation. Drink freely.” My table manners might have been lacking that day, but I knew that this obligation stuff really mattered. Though how I could possibly hold such a thing over a ghost... I caught Thomas’s eye and saw something there that I couldn’t quite define. I wondered if he would have been able to say it, in my position, if the obligation might have bound him to stay.

Mellenby raised the cup to his lips- so far, so good- and sipped experimentally. From the look of bliss on his face, I gathered that it had worked. Thomas was staring, his own drink untouched. I reached out to touch him- he jumped as if he’d been burned. Tea spilled over our hands and his jumper. “Oh, Peter, I’m so sorry, I…” he trailed off, but his expression said it all. He’d forgotten I was even there.

I took a breath, closed my eyes, and tried to rein in those pesky little emotions which will insist on existing at the most inappropriate times. This was not the time for envy or sulking. Thomas was unwell thanks to some as yet undefined external entity; Mellenby was here to help. And, as for any jealousy I might have felt towards him, I had to tell myself that he was dead to me. Because he was dead. To me. And to everyone. He was just dead. Full stop.

Only, now it was more of a comma, which was why we were all here. “So, what’s this all about?” I asked, before the silence could get any more awkward than it already was.

Mellenby put down his cup and looked across the table, all business. “Thomas, I want you to cast a werelight.”

Thomas frowned and shifted in what I recognised to be embarrassment. He cleared his throat,  coughed, took a sip of his now-lukewarm tea and grimaced. “I afraid my magic’s been a little off of late.”

“Humour me,” Mellenby requested, “give it a try.”

Obediently, Thomas held out his hand and murmured ‘lux’. A spherical light formed, but it was nowhere near as bright or brilliant as it should have been. It was yellow, rather than white, and wavered like the flame in a gas lamp.

I was distracted from my concern when Mellenby held out his own hand. The light he formed was almost blinding. Like the spark of ignited potassium.

Thomas’s werelight flickered and died and he fainted.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for your comments! I love to read your theories about what's going to happen / has happened. Please do keep posting them.

At first I’d been terrified that he’d had a stroke or an aneurism, but he started to stir when we got him to the sofa and seemed to be- if not fine, exactly- at least not in imminent danger.

Then I rounded on Mellenby, furious. I’m frequently miffed, especially when things don’t go my way at work- I can mumble under my breath with the best of them. But I’m very rarely _angry_ ; now, I wanted to hit something or, more specifically, someone. Fists clenched at my sides, I squared up to him, “you _knew_ this was going to happen! You knew and you made him use magic!”

Mellenby shook his head, looking apologetic but otherwise unphased. I suppose once you’re dead any further threats to your person are a bit of an anticlimax. “I had an hypothesis, but I couldn’t know for sure. I had no direct evidence that…”

I grabbed a fistful of his jacket, “‘hypothesis,’ ‘ _evidence_ ,’ can you even hear yourself? What is he, some experiment to you?! Well, no- enough is enough. He’s not a lab rat to be messed about with for your scientific amusement.”

The man inside the jacket went very still and very pale- no mean feat when you’re a ghost. If there was a line, I’d certainly crossed it with a hop, skip and a very long jump, but I wasn’t backing down. _He_ had crossed one of his own. For several moments, neither of us moved. It was Thomas who broke the silence.

“Am I dead?” he asked dazedly from the sofa and I frowned for a moment before realising what a strange tableau we must have made to wake up to: his current lover and his dead lover wrestling in his living room. We both took a step away from each other. I rushed forward to Thomas while Mellenby brushed himself off.

Crouching on the floor in front of the sofa, I took Thomas’s face in my hands. “Not dead. Very much not dead,” I checked his eyes without really knowing what I was checking for and generally pawed at him ineffectually for some time until I realised he was giving me one of his Fondly Exasperated Looks(™).

“Peter, I’m quite alright now. Thank you. I’m sorry I gave you a fright.” He began to sit himself up and I helped him; he didn’t resist, but I think that was more for my sake than his own. Once upright he was seized by another coughing fit. I patted his back.

“It’s alright,” I assured him when he could breathe again, “it wasn’t _your_ fault.” Noticing my pointed inflection, Thomas looked between me and Mellenby and sighed.

He straightened his shirt collar and jumper and addressed Mellenby with a tone of steady command, “David, what did you learn?”

“It would appear that I am somehow leaching your magical energy. And I have reason to believe that I was not its intended source but that I am merely the accidental byproduct of a much wider scheme.” I wondered what these ‘reasons’ were, but I supposed he'd had to have been doing something with his afterlife between our meetings.

Mellenby stared off into the middle-distance, apparently crossing off a mental checklist as he continued, “someone has sabotaged your central heating in an attempt to disguise the drop in your body’s core temperature as the energy is drained. If we find the saboteur, we’ll find our man.”

Or woman... or, quite possibly, gender neutral entity... though I had a very strong suspicion about who the culprit might be. I frowned, something I half remembered coming to mind, “don’t ghosts lower the temperature where they are?” I think I’d seen that in a film- it might have been The Sixth Sense- I was hoping it was rooted in some kind of fact because I was beginning to really sympathise with the kid. _I see dead people. All the time_.

Mellenby, who seemed by now to be adapting to my, as I like to see it, _avant garde_ approach to questioning, merely nodded in response. “Yes; I believe that that is how they,” he frowned, “how we…” more frowning, “how _non-cellular bodies_ subsist. They consume magical energy, albeit in insufficient quantities to cause anything more than a slight chill-- in the general way of things.”

“Energy consumption… That was what you specialised in.” The first paper of Mellenby’s that Thomas had leant me had been his thesis on werelight energy consumption. I still had a scanned copy of it in my room.

Mellenby’s eyes narrowed, “yes, but if you think I had anything to…”

“No, nothing like that,” I waved a hand impatiently, “but you trained Woodville-Gentle, and _he_ trained Sutton- or at least Sutton wanted to replicate his work…”

“But that doesn’t mean you’re to blame,” Thomas interrupted, rising to his feet. His voice was urgent, tone almost pleading, and when I turned to look at him in confusion, I saw that his eyes were wide, imploring. And then I realised-- but Mellenby got there first.

Before I knew it, David Mellenby had Thomas, _my_ Thomas, in his arms. Some primal part of me wanted to pounce, but I stood back and watched, grinding my teeth slightly because I was still pissed at him and I had a one track mind stuck on _mine_. He pulled back and cupped Thomas’s cheeks, one in each hand.

“Listen to me,” he said firmly, “my death was not your fault. I should have explained, left a note or - or something, but I thought that I could make it look like a stroke, natural causes… I shouldn’t have doubted your ability to see through that.”

I couldn’t see Mellenby’s face from where I stood, but I could see Thomas’s. His throat was working overtime, his mouth moving silently before he managed to croak a single word, “ _why?_ ”


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, comments are appreciated to a ridiculous degree. Reading and re-reading them is fic fuel.
> 
> Onwards with the story (with apologies to France...)

Buddhists have this word- Upādāna- which, roughly translated, means ‘clinging’ and which they believe to be one of the root causes of all suffering. I know this because my flatmate Jaget has a collection of books on this stuff and he sometimes leaves them in the loo. Anyway, for the aspirational Buddhist, the goal is to stop all that attachment nonsense altogether and aim for Nirvana- not the band, but a kind of nothingness. Presumably because _with the lights out, it’s less dangerous_ … (I feel stupid and contagious).

The thing is, I thought as I saw Thomas hold on to David Mellenby’s arms for dear life, that it’s just not that easy to let go, no matter how painful the clinging might be.

I couldn’t imagine how he must have been feeling. My dad had died a few years previously- he’d been pulling faces at the grim reaper for decades before his death but it had still been a shock and I missed him. A few months after it happened I went out to the pub with Lesley, Bev and Jaget; we all got a philosophical sort of wasted and Lesley asked whether, if I had the chance to have my dad back for a day, I would take it.

It had taken a lot of thought- and another pint- but eventually I’d answered no. Sure, it hurt like hell, and I still went to my parents’ flat and half expected him to be there, but it would hurt more to go through that all over again. “No… he’d be there but… not there. And I’d know it.” Lesley had nodded and looked down at her glass. She’d lost her leg below the knee after that madness at Covent Garden a few years ago- she knew all about phantom limbs.

Mellenby still hadn’t answered the question. He wiped Thomas’s tears from his cheeks with his thumbs. “You remember that Tennyson poem Master Hollinghurst used to quote whenever we became too curious?”

I saw Thomas frown in confusion before his eyes widened and he floundered, slightly, “but David, I…”

Shaking his head, Mellenby pressed on, “you remember the line?”

“Well, yes, but surely…”

Mellenby cut him off, “repeat it for me.”

Thomas shook his head before conceding with a sigh, “ _ours is not to reason why_. David, please… I have a right to…”

“No, Thomas,” Mellenby’s voice was sharp, but not unkind. I wondered if he might have been channelling this Hollinghurst. I also wondered why Mellenby was so keen to avoid giving Thomas information that he had given me freely. Vanity, possibly? Not wanting to admit to having had a failing mind, if not body.

“You have a right to live your life, as all men have. I lived mine and I ended it. It was not your fault and there was nothing you could have done or said to prevent it. If I had left a note, it would have said just that. I was an old man you know how disinclined I’ve always been to concede control,” his voice was gentle, slightly teasing. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know the story, there. “I do not regret my decision, Thomas, only the suffering it caused you.”

After Thomas had made the comment about not being about to keel over from a cold as he ‘wasn’t an Austen heroine,’ I’d skimmed through a couple of novels to figure out what he meant. Now it seemed I was in one. In retrospect, I probably wouldn’t have been too surprised if Thomas broke away and started pacing broodily- _“In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow be to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”_

Instead he just stared at Mellenby, tears falling freely now, until eventually he managed a weak smile, made a sound that was the bastard child of a laugh and a sob before breaking off into another coughing fit. Just as well, really- he hadn’t had anywhere near as long as Mellenby to prepare flowery speeches and I wouldn’t have wanted him to be shown up. I didn’t think any of this at the time, of course, torn between concern for Thomas, lingering anger at Mellenby (mixed in with quite a lot of sympathy, too, just to make things complicated), and awkwardness, because  _emotions_.

Mellenby started to lead Thomas towards the sofa and I hesitated before heading out to fetch him some water, because I am a Mature and Responsible Adult and hovering jealously would have been an unworthy pursuit. It was extremely tempting, though. When I returned, Thomas had stopped coughing and looked calmer. I caught the end of a conversation “... you always did say Hamlet lacked empiricism. So how is it, that undiscovered country?”

David snorted, “well, it isn’t _French_ , at any rate. So thank God for small mercies!” They both laughed at that. I didn’t. But then, I’ve never been to France.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quotes are from Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', Tennyson's 'Charge of the Light Brigade', Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice' and Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Peter has a tether and is at the end of it.
> 
> Comments, are, as ever, the chocolates and flowers of the fic world.

I headed to the sofa and passed Thomas the glass. He smiled at me, a small but honest thing, and took hold of my arm when I turned to go. I looked down at his fingers and then at his face. “Thank you, Peter. Won’t you sit down?” there was a note of uncertainty in his voice but I didn’t need to be asked twice. I slumped onto the sofa like a faulty marionette.

Toby seemed to take this as an invitation and he jumped into my lap, eying Mellenby warily. He’d cowered under a side table when he’d cast his werelight.

Mellenby was eying Toby right back, “I feel your dog might well come in useful, Thomas.” I dreaded to think how or why.

Thomas nodded thoughtfully, “he has always had a nose for the uncanny. Perhaps we can take him with us when we hunt for Sutton. And I do believe that Sutton _is_ our most likely culprit.”

“Who is he, this Sutton?” Mellenby asked, just as I exclaimed, “ _we_? Not bloody likely!”

Both men turned to look at me; I straightened up, ignoring the indignant looks I was getting from Toby. “In answer to your question, Sutton is a raging psycho wizard with a particular fondness for blowing up buildings and really bad taste in role models. He’s from the Woodville-Gentle school of fucking with Darwin; I had a close encounter with one of his cat people. And _no_ , I don’t think it’s a good idea for  _us_ to go hunting for him.”

They looked at me for an explanation. I thought my reasoning was pretty bloody obvious, myself. “I can barely burn a hole in paper,” I turned to Thomas, “ _you_ can’t do magic at the moment… and you’re a sodding _ghost_!” My voice had gone unreasonably high as I stared Mellenby down and I became aware that I was shaking.

I felt Thomas’s hand on my arm, “I do apologise, Peter. With David here I appear to have fallen into old habits- by ‘we’, I meant the Folly.”

“Right…” I blinked, “and that’s alright with you? Even after they…” Mellenby gave me a warning glare. This was apparently not my day for deductive reasoning. He’d known all along that the Folly would have to be involved, and Thomas’s already antagonistic relationship with them would not have been improved by him confirming his suspicions that they were largely responsible for the manner of his departure. _Oh well, forgive and forget, old chap…_

I really did wish that he’d have actually _told_ me a few of these things before we came down to Thomas’s flat, though, rather than expecting me to translate a series of meaningful looks.

Thomas had seen our exchange and looked set to inquire when Mellenby cut him off, “do you still have those books I borrowed from the Folly?”

“ _Stole_ , you mean,” Thomas accused with a tone of mock reproach.

Mellenby snorted. “They are a _little_ late, granted.”

My head was pounding.

Mellenby continued, “you can still do some magic, that’s good. It gives us a scale by which to gauge the possible time frame; we’ll have to test its depletion at regular intervals, preferably with you lying down.” They exchanged a grin, like little boys planning a midnight trip to the kitchen. Like this was a _game_.

I wasn’t having any of it. “He’s still _breathing_ , too. You planning on marking the depletion of that off on your little chart as well?”

Breathing wasn’t something I was finding too easy at the time, either. I felt like I’d run a very long race. Thomas’s hand on my arm tightened and I think I might have heard him ask Mellenby if he’d give us a moment. It sounded like his voice was coming from a very long way away.

“ _Peter_ ,” the familiarly exasperated tone and the slightly raised voice that suggested he’d tried to get my attention a few times before and failed brought me back a bit. I turned to face him. Toby lost interest in my lap and hopped off, heading in the direction of his basket.

Thomas looked better than he had in weeks: there was some colour in his cheeks and his eyes were bright and alert. He still looked like shit, on the whole, but it was a definite improvement. I thought maybe that Mellenby’s presence had been the thing to change it all, and I found, guiltily, that I didn’t like that one bit. Fortunately, that old green eyed monster didn’t get the opportunity to linger- or at least not for this particular reason.

“Peter, I’m sorry,” he was stroking my arm, now, “I’ve been getting a little carried away. This must all seem very strange to you, but it was my life for so many years. Vampires, unruly trolls, black… _ethically challenged_ magicians… old Francis Scott almost got himself impaled by a unicorn, once… It’s not that I’ve missed it, exactly, but I…” he shrugged self consciously and I felt myself calming by degrees.

“It was what you knew,” I supplied for him. I think I could understand- a bit, at least. Whenever I go to my uncle’s flat I immediately attempt to sit on the floor, even if there’s a chair available, and then resume old arguments with my cousins, right where we left off.

Thomas nodded, “and I was good at it. It could be dangerous, I grant you, but some of the greatest dangers I faced in the course of my careers in the police force and the army were non-magical. The closest I’ve come to dying was when perfectly ordinary men shot me. I’d never had so much of a scratch from a werewolf.”

My voice was slightly choked, “ _werewolf_?”

He waved a hand dismissively, “extinct in the United Kingdom since 1884- no cause for concern.”

I didn’t really know what to say to that. Thomas’s hands were running a trail down my side and I leant into him. He coughed a few times, and it sounded painful, but he managed to get it under control. “I’ve had quite enough of that.”

I could imagine. “We’ll get the bastard.” Even I was guilty of saying ‘we’, now.

Thomas smiled and nodded, “that we will. But Peter… this is--  a most irregular situation.” He motioned vaguely around the living room, looking quite baffled himself. “With David and… everything else. I feel as if I were in some kind of a dream. You will…” he grimaced “ _wake_ me, won’t you, if anything seems…” there was another vague gesture before he sighed hopelessly. I couldn’t blame him, I was having a hard enough time myself.

“Yeah. Yeah, I will,” and just to emphasise my intention to play fairytale alarm-clock prince to the fullest extent of my abilities, I kissed him.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is now obscenely long (for me, at least) and just getting longer. 
> 
> Comments loved, honoured and cherished.

My phone vibrated in my pocket.

After the fourth vibration, Thomas murmured against my lips “shouldn’t you answer that?”

I made a noncommittal noise and brushed my nose against his cheek and ear.

“It might be important.”

Cursing Alexander Graham Bell, I slid the phone out of my pocket and checked the caller ID. It was Lesley. I answered.

“I take it no one’s dead yet?” she said by way of greeting.

“Hi Lesley,” I felt Thomas relax against me, though I wasn’t sure who he’d thought it might have been.

“ _Peter_ ,” she, too, had an exasperated tone that she seemed to like to crack out for use on my name in particular. It was more difficult to define her particular style as ‘fond’, as well, but I liked to think that she was just being subtle about it. “What was all that about earlier?”

“Just a minute…” I moved the phone down to my chest to muffle it and turned to Thomas. “What should I say?”

He looked thoughtful for a moment, then replied, “tell her to telephone Inspector Lewis and Sergeant Guleed and ask them to convene here for a briefing as soon as possible. If Inspector Lewis could bring his case notes, that might be pertinent. I can’t help but feel that our missing persons case might be somehow connected to... “ he motioned vaguely, “all of this.”

There was a quality to the silence when I raised the phone to my ear again that suggested Lesley might be getting just a little bit impatient. I sensed foot tapping. “Still there, Lesley?”

I’m fairly sure the sound she made qualified as a snarl.

“Thomas says you should call Inspector Lewis and Sahra and then come over to his flat- as soon as you can. And ask Inspector Lewis if he could bring his case notes,” I looked to Thomas to see if there was anything else. He shook his head, then coughed harshly.

Lesley’s voice might have been raised because she was pissed, or to make herself heard over the sound of Thomas’s coughing. It was hard to tell. “Peter, I can’t just drag my boss out of the house at…” a pause, I presume while she checked the time, “ten thirty on a weekday evening without any explanation!”

Thomas was still coughing and David Mellenby emerged from wherever he’d been haunting- the study, I thought; it seemed unlikely that he’d been in the bathroom for all that time. Might have taken a shower, I suppose. Must be quite a novelty if you’re dead. I rested a hand on Thomas’s back, wincing as I felt the effort it cost him to hack his lungs up. I was pretty much ignoring Mellenby, but he didn’t comment; I was also ignoring Lesley, she did.

“Peter?” she still sounded annoyed, but there was concern there, too. “Are you sure it’s not a doctor I should be calling?”

I wasn’t, but given what I knew, I didn’t think a doctor was top of our priorities. A priest, maybe- anyone qualified to perform an exorcist. Someone with substantial medical training was a close second, though, and I was definitely going to call Dr Walid as soon as I had a moment, the time of night be damned. “Thomas thinks he has a lead on your case,” I evaded, “just… we need you here, alright?”

I must have sounded appropriately pathetic, because Lesley took pity on me. “We’ll all be there within the hour,” I didn’t ask how she could be so sure. If anyone could get a senior Detective Inspector out of bed and back into a suit, it was Lesley May. Not that she couldn’t do the reverse, too, but… well, I didn’t want to think about that. Much. Me being a happily… partnered… man.

There had been this dream, though, about me, Lesley and Beverley Brook in bed and sometimes- just sometimes- the memory was hard to shake.

“Peter!” her sympathy had vanished with my failure to respond. At least Thomas had stopped coughing, though he looked rough and was leaning into my side, David holding the glass of water for him. I really needed to get my mind back on track.

“Thanks, Lesley.” She grumbled something and hung up. I wrapped an arm around Thomas, catching Mellenby’s eye as I did so; I was a little surprised to see that he didn’t seem to mind. If anything he looked like he approved. I stared for a little longer than I should have and his eyes narrowed questioningly. I shook my head. It still felt like it was full of cotton wool, but at least I had something else to focus on- Thomas was talking.

“Peter, if you could stay here to greet Inspector Lewis and his team, David and I will go and see what books we can find in storage. No doubt we’re going to need all of the material we can find.” His voice was hoarse, but from his tone he could just have announced he was popping out to the corner shop to buy some milk. Not that I would have approved of that idea, either, given that he could barely sit upright on the sofa.

I rolled my eyes, because sometimes you just have to. “And who’s going to drive?”

Thomas looked mildly affronted, “I’m perfectly capable of driving, Peter.” I gave him a look, patented by my mother, which said ‘are you sure you wouldn’t like to rethink that response?’ better than words could manage.

“I can drive,” Mellenby offered. He probably meant to be helpful but, frankly, he was just being an idiot.

I’m fairly sure my eyebrows must have disappeared into my hairline by this point. “Thomas, you’re not leaving the sofa. And I know how stubborn you are, but I wouldn’t advise even trying. D-” somehow I just couldn’t bring myself to call him ‘David’. Even in my head it was always ‘Mellenby’. “You,” I motioned- rude, yes, but effective. “You haven’t driven a car in forty years. I don’t care that the car is older than that, the motorway is not.” Actually, I wasn’t sure. It might have been, but I was fairly certain there were a great many things about London traffic that made it inadvisable for someone to dive straight into it after four decades without an extensive refresher course.

“Besides,” I continued, “you’re a  _ghost_.” Granted, he wasn’t your typical spirit (whatever _that_ was), but I wasn’t entrusting my boyfriend’s welfare as he hurtled along in a vintage metal tube to a man who was already dead. Though, to tell the truth the dead guy currently looked healthier than Thomas did.

Mellenby opened his mouth to argue but then closed it again. Smart man; I knew there was a reason I’d admired his papers. “What would you suggest, Peter?” I thought I heard a slight overemphasis on my name, but that might have been my own paranoia at my apparent inability to say his own.  

I shrugged. “Simple. Thomas gives me the address and stays here to let the Order in, I’ll drive, you hunt.”

Mellenby frowned, “ _the Order_?”

Thomas shook his head, looking comically despairing. He never really approved of my pop culture references, but this had actually been one of Lesley’s suggestions after our raid on Sutton’s lair. Well, less ‘suggestion’ and more grumble- _“how do I explain to my parents that I’ve signed up to the Order of the bloody Phoenix?”_ \- but it had stuck. With me, at least.

Giving up his quest for an answer as a bad job, Mellenby shrugged. “That sounds like a good enough plan to me. Thomas, don’t attempt any magic until we get back.”

Thomas sighed, apparently resigned to his fate. “I wasn’t planning on it.” I hadn’t thought he would be, especially after what had happened the last time he’d tried. And that was only a werelight.

I got the postcode of the storage unit from Thomas and typed it into my phone while Mellenby leaned over to see what I was doing. “Extraordinary!” he exclaimed as a map appeared. “How on earth did you get it to do that?” I felt unaccountably smug.

“Right,” I turned my head to give Thomas a relatively chaste but lingering kiss. “This shouldn’t take long, but call me if something happens or you feel worse?”

Thomas made a noncommittal noise, but he bent forward a little so that our foreheads touched. That would have to do for now. I reached out and cupped the back of his neck before kissing his forehead. “I love you- remember that, yeah?”

I know I’d only said that to him for the first time earlier that evening, but I’d quite quickly come to see that I probably should have said it months before. Granted, we weren’t alone, now- and Thomas’s ears had gone slightly pink in a way that had nothing to do with the fact it was still sodding freezing in his flat- but I found I didn’t mind saying it in front of Mellenby.

 _Quite the opposite, in fact_ a part of my brain that I wished wouldn’t be so bloody reasonable all the time pointed out. I chose to ignore the voice of reason on this occasion- it had been that kind of day.

Thomas was looking at me as if he was trying to puzzle something out. If he’d been less emotionally and physically battered, he’d have seen through me right away and given me a stern lecture about there being a time and a place for such sentiments and how this was neither. He’d also have accused me of being a colossal berk, in exactly those words, and he’d have been right. As it was, I gave him what I hoped was a benign smile (nothing too sharky), just in case he was doubting my sincerity. His lips twitched slightly in return. “I…” he cleared his throat, “you too.”

His eyes darted up to Mellenby, which was only natural, I suppose, given the position I’d put him in, but still… I looked up, too, daring the dead guy to object. He didn’t look about to- instead he was misty eyed in a way I had seen before, but not since we’d come down to Thomas’s flat.

I felt a bit guilty, then- ok, a lot guilty- because, hell, this can’t have been easy for him, either, and he’d been holding himself together. For Thomas’s sake, I realised. _Better late than never…_ He gave Thomas a jerky nod and a similarly unsteady smile and Thomas turned back to me.

“I love you, too.” I was happy to hear him say it, of course I was. But it didn’t stop me feeling like I’d just swallowed a particularly heavy rock. I gave the back of his neck a brief squeeze and stood up, sliding my phone into my pocket.

“We won’t be long,” I told the room in general and took Thomas’s car keys from their designated hook. Mellenby gave Thomas an overly cheerful wave and hurried out into the hallway. I waved, too, for want of anything better to do with my free hand and then followed Mellenby out.

He was facing the front door, posture rigid and from what I could see of his profile as I approached I noticed that he was biting his lip in a way that made me wonder if he could feel pain. After a moment’s indecision, I rested a hand on his shoulder, “I’m not sorry I said it, but I should have known that…”

Mellenby shook his head and turned to me, gripping one of my arms in both of his. “ _I’m_ not sorry you said it.” His voice was barely more than a whisper, “you know why I did what I did. If I went to such lengths to ensure Thomas’s safety, back then, do you honestly think I would begrudge him his happiness now? That I’d begrudge  _you_?”

He released my arm and turned away, heading out of the door. It was just as well- I had no idea what answer I would have given.


	18. Chapter 18

I’ve never been a hoarder. Never had the opportunity, what with my mum sending my Lego off to West Africa whenever my back was turned. Thomas wasn’t, either, or so I’d thought. His flat is the neatest I’d ever been into and so uncluttered that it actually manages to look spacious. The one exception to this is his study which is so full of books that you have to walk sideways to get from one side to the other. The storage unit was highly organised, granted, but there was a definite Smaug vibe going on. Old clothes, furniture, musical instruments, paintings and what seemed to be scientific equipment, all arranged by function in various containers.

I knew that we were there to hunt for books, and they were handily arranged on bookshelves, so I stepped over to them with the intention of doing just that. Mellenby, however, had not moved. He’d been staring from the moment I turned the light on and didn’t look set to budge anytime soon. It struck me that none of the items in the unit could have been newer than thirty years old. I paused, book in hand and turned to him, “this stuff… it’s yours, isn’t it?”

He nodded mutely.

Now, I might have been behaving like a bit of an ass where Mellenby was concerned, but I’m not completely lacking in sympathy. I still hadn’t reached the stage where I could listen to jazz and not get teary about my dad, and I don’t even _like_ jazz. Here was a man staring at the remains of his old life- of his life, in general- all preserved and stored away like museum artefacts by his partner. I put the book down and went over to him.

“I thought he’d have got rid of this,” Mellenby said faintly, “not the books but… the rest of it.”

I’d known he’d at least kept Mellenby’s papers- I had copies of several, after all- but as for the rest… On reflection, I couldn’t say that I was surprised. I’d known for as long as I’d known Thomas that he’d downsized to move into his flat, and I tried to picture what I might do, in that situation, if Thomas was dead and I had to do something with his worldly goods.... I didn’t like to imagine it- couldn’t, really, it just seemed too horrifying a prospect- but I did know I’d probably not get rid of anything I could store.

I shuffled closer to Mellenby with the intention of providing a safely non-gay show of support- a fairly futile stipulation given what we both were in relation to Thomas, but old habits die hard. My foot tapped up against something- several somethings- and I looked down. There were numerous canvases on the floor and I picked one up at random.

Thomas, no doubt as fed up of having to explain his references to me as I was with him, had once lent me a copy of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian- who I suspected of being a member of the Folly, because he seemed just the type of snide, sanctimonious, upper-class prick that they tended to favour (with certain notable exceptions)- was so in love with himself that he decided he was going to leave aging to the plebs and get a portrait to decay in his place. Looking at the portrait I held, I wondered if such a thing really was possible with magic. Or at least a variation on the theme.

Mellenby noticed my distraction and moved to see what I had been looking at. “Oh,” he said with the merest hint of surprise mingled with a definite amount of amusement. “How funny. I’d forgotten all about that.” The subject of the portrait, or the sitter, or whatever, was David Mellenby himself, as he was now. _Exactly_ , as he was now. Right down to the colour of the handkerchief in his breast pocket.

“Thomas painted it, you know,” Mellenby said, seemingly unaware of the herd of elephants that had just stormed into the room. “He’d like you to sit for him, I’m sure. I didn’t see any paints in his home, but once he gets his hand in… And he should; he has so many talents and has never been at all suited to the quiet life, even when he was… err, older, I suppose.”

There was  _vestigia_ associated with the painting that was undoubtedly the result of Thomas’s _signare_ , but I could sense another as well, and I felt sick.

“I say,” Mellenby exclaimed, concern making him plummy again. “Are you quite alright?” He didn’t quite call me ‘dear boy’, but I got the impression it was a close thing.

I put the painting down to one side and bent to examine the other portraits, “did Albert Woodville-Gentle ever sit for Thomas?” My voice was tight and my stomach churned- I already knew the answer.

“Yes, I think he might well have. He was my apprentice,” he didn’t need to ask why I’d brought it up, instead kneeling beside me and helping me look. I could see from his posture that he was as tense as I was. As I’ve said before, smart man.

There were some very nice landscapes, a couple of nudes that I didn’t want to think too much about, thank-you-very-much, though I supposed I should be thankful for small mercies that Mellenby had reappeared with his clothes _on_. I flicked through some more, finding one that looked almost exactly like Molly, and then…

“Stop!” Mellenby ordered. I was glad he was with me, because it occurred to me then that I wouldn’t have had the faintest idea that this was the man I was looking for.

The figure in the painting was of indeterminate age- somewhere around thirty five, I’d say if pushed- with blond hair, sharp blue-grey eyes and very little chin to speak of. How appropriate that he’d look like a stereotype of one of Hitler’s golden boys.

Tentatively, I moved my hand from the frame to the centre of the picture. I felt Nightingale- wood smoke, pine and canvas- and mingled in with his _s_ _ignare_ in a way that made me retch, I felt Sutton’s.


	19. Chapter 19

I don’t know too much about forensics, but I know enough to realise that pawing at evidence is A Very Bad Idea. We’d already pawed enough, but since there was no sense in making a bad situation worse, Mellenby and I (that one’s for you, Thomas) wrapped the pictures in bubble wrap before carrying them out. We also wrapped the relevant books up before removing them, just in case they’d taken Sutton’s fancy as well. When we closed the door, Mellenby examined the lock closely but couldn’t find any signs that it had been tampered with. There had been no wards on the door, though there were on Thomas’s flat- but then, there was nothing in the storage unit that he’d considered more than sentimentally valuable.

On the way to the car, I called Dr Walid. It took him a while to answer and he didn’t sound too happy when he did, “what time do you call this, eh?” his voice was rough and particularly Glaswegian with interrupted sleep.

“I…” I looked down at the hideously expensive (but not even remotely expensively hideous) watch that Thomas had given me for our first Christmas together. It told me that it was just gone midnight. “Oh.” There wasn’t much more I could say to that.

Dr Walid sighed, “I take it it’s something important?” I heard fabric rustling. He knew me well enough to start getting dressed in readiness.

“It’s Thomas…” the rustling stopped, “I know you’ve been doing tests and stuff, but we think there’s something magical going on. It’s complicated, but… There’s someone else you’re going to want to meet, and… And Thomas fainted earlier when he tried to use magic but he’s going to have to keep trying…” I still didn’t like this part, “for… science.” It was late, I was tired, worried and I hadn’t had any dinner. I think I can be forgiven, just this once.

Mellenby was looking at me oddly, carrying a bag of books in each hand. I had my phone wedged precariously between my ear and my chin, a bubble-wrapped painting under each arm, popping noises following behind me at regular intervals as I moved through the car park.

The rustling had begun again in earnest (whether Earnest wanted it or not… yeah, I really was tired enough to think that). “Where are you? Is he with you?”

“No, Thomas is at the flat. We’re heading back now,” we’d reached the Jag which, though pretty damned sexy, as cars go, was about as impractical for this purpose as it was possible for a car to be. Not least because you had to put the key in the door to open the damned thing. I never thought I’d see the day when I’d be pining for my Ford Asbo instead.

“I’ve got to go- see you there.” Dr Walid confirmed this as I put one of the paintings down by the car and slid the phone free to hang up. It was a relief that he was coming- and if he couldn’t do anything else, at least he could help with the reading. Another pair of Latin-understanding eyes.

I opened the car and Mellenby put the books in the footwells in front of the back seats before helping me maneuver the paintings, Tetris style, in through the boot.

We reached mine and Thomas’s building just as Dr Walid was getting out of his car. I parked and jogged over to him, “could we have a hand?” I motioned to the car. He nodded and eyed the paintings curiously. Between the three of us it was easier to get them out of the Jag than it had been to get them into it. We didn’t even scratch the paintwork. Not in too many obvious spots, anyway.

Still, entering the flat laden with books and canvases was not the quietest process, not that we had known we would need it to be. Our weary band of travellers entered to a chorus of shushing from Lesley, Bev and Sahra accompanied by a glare from Molly and a slightly apologetic look from Inspector Lewis.

The reason for our reprimand was curled up on the sofa, wheezing slightly in his sleep. Dr Walid had books in his left hand and his medical bag in his right. He put the former down by the coffee table and strode over to his patient with the latter.

Toby came over to sniff the paintings and started growling and yapping. So much for letting Thomas sleep. He blinked awake and looked around in confusion before starting to cough. Dr Walid clearly liked the sound of it just about as much as I did, and he removed his stethoscope. “Abdul?” Nightingale questioned as he was professionally manhandled, “what are you doing here?”

Inspector Lewis put the book he was reading down- it was in Greek. I couldn’t have told you what it was about, but I could tell you that much- and headed over to examine the paintings curiously. “What are these?”

Thomas, more alert now, craned his neck to try and get a look. Dr Walid got his attention back by failing to warm the stethoscope before pressing it under his shirt. I hovered at Thomas’s side, just in case he needed hot towels or cold water or whatever.

Dr Walid frowned and moved the stethoscope again. “I’ll be quite alright after a rest, Abdul,” Thomas protested. “There’s no need to fuss.” The good doctor, having been dragged out of his bed in the middle of dreams about whatever he dreamed about (MRIs, possibly), retaliated to this obvious bollocks by shoving a thermometer unceremoniously under Thomas’s tongue.

Patient subdued, at least for the time it took to get a temperature reading, Dr Walid took Thomas’s wrist in his hand.

While I was proving to be about as useful as a blind guide dog, Mellenby began passing around the books and explaining the possible significance of the paintings in low enough tones that Thomas wouldn’t have been able to hear. Not that I could hear, either, but I could see him motioning to where the portraits were leaning out of the corner of my eye. Everyone else looked appropriately serious so I supposed they’d all been fully briefed.

Thermometer removed, Dr Walid shook his head, apparently despairing at not being able to get the patients these days. “Peter, could you get a duvet, blanket, hot water bottle- anything, really.”

I nodded, pausing only to make a mental checklist of where everything would be. As I hesitated, Dr Walid leant forward to murmur in Thomas’s ear. I caught just part of it, “...saw the reading, I know you feel like shit… your bloody stiff upper lip…” I hurried off before I could get caught eavesdropping.

When I came back, Dr Walid had a restraining hand on Thomas’s shoulder and he was giving him a mutinous look to which the doctor responded with a serene smile calculated precisely to make Thomas sulk. Sulking was good, at the moment. Sulking was definitely better than him getting too curious about the portraits before he’d had a chance to warm up- at least a little.

I wrapped the blankets and duvet around him and as I brushed against him I felt pine, wood smoke and canvas. Remembering the sense of violation I’d felt in the vestigia of the paintings, I swallowed hard and bent to kiss the top of his head reflexively. Was that what he’d been feeling, on top of everything else, for all these weeks? He gave me a concerned look, buried under a mound of bedding- “was everything alright?” he questioned, though his expression asked ‘is something the matter with you?’

I nodded slowly, “there was something, but…”

Mellenby joined us, “sorry to interrupt. Doctor, thank you for coming at this late hour. David Mellenby,” he held out his hand to Walid who gaped at him, looking between me and Thomas, Mellenby and back again. Walid knew exactly who he was…

“Fuck me,” our long-suffering medico swore succinctly. I’d never heard him do that before, but it seemed like an accurate summary of the situation at hand.

Mellenby looked a little nonplussed, but Thomas stepped in before things could get too awkward. Metaphorically speaking, that is- he was still swaddled on the sofa. “It’s a long story, Abdul, but this _is_ David Mellenby.”

“You’re alive?” Dr Walid was still wide-eyed. No matter what strange things he’d observed as the Folly’s crypto-pathologist in chief, it was actually quite comforting to know that there were some things that still shocked him.

Now looking amused, Mellenby shook his head, “no, quite dead, I assure you.” He held out his arm, Dr Walid felt for a pulse. Then he moved onto his other wrist. Then grappled with his neck. Fortunately, Thomas stopped him before he could go for the femoral. “Abdul...  It’s a good thing you’re here. Peter found this part a little trying last time.”

My eyes widened. I’d known this was coming- that was part of my reason for calling in Dr Walid, after all- but that didn’t make me less uneasy. Dr Walid looked grim, “I’m not going to like this, am I?”

Thomas’s lips twitched. “That rather depends on what happens,” he held out his hand.

A faint ball of light hovered over Thomas’s outstretched palm, Mellenby began to glow, Bev and Lesley swore as the paintings did the same. Toby barked, Molly hissed, the lights went out and Thomas screamed.


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your comments! Please do keep 'em coming.

I’d never been more grateful for torches, or for the fact that the police and doctors habitually carry them (when it comes to needing light- any light- size really doesn’t matter, and Dr Walid’s pen torch was a welcome addition). Thomas’s face was worryingly colourless, his eyes screwed shut with obvious pain. Despite being in a state which even he would have admitted was ‘less than comfortable,’ I knew that wasn’t what had made him call out. He was angry- furious- and fighting whatever unseen force it was that was making his life miserable with everything he had left. 

I touched his arm and immediately withdrew my hand. Sutton’s  _ signare _ … I’d know it anywhere, now. I must have made a sound, myself, because now Dr Walid was looking at us both in alarmed confusion. I doubt this had been covered in medical school. 

“Get them out,” I choked, “the paintings- get them out of here. And away… somewhere. With trees,” I was clutching at straws a bit with that last point, but I knew that natural things weren’t good ‘magic conductors’ (Thomas always pursed his lips when I called them that). No one argued with me- but then, any port in a storm. 

Inspector Lewis picked up one painting, grunted and pushed Sahra away when she attempted to lift the other. “No… better not…” by the light of Sahra and Lesley’s torches I could see Lewis straining with the effort of holding the picture, sweat breaking out on his forehead. The  _ vestigia _ I’d felt from the paintings had made me sick in the storage unit, and that was before they’d become radioactive. I doubted the bubble wrap still covering them would act as much of a barrier against… whatever it was.

David Mellenby- who'd had the decency to stop glowing, even if the paintings hadn’t- took the portrait from Lewis who didn’t exactly offer much resistance. Then he picked up the second. “I’ll deal with these,” he announced before heading out of the flat. To ‘deal with’ the paintings, I presumed. Whatever that meant.

Whatever it was that he was doing, it seemed to be working. Gradually, the tension in Thomas’s posture began to ease, though his eyes stayed shut. The rest of us all hovered uselessly in a huddle at the periphery of the not-especially-large living room, faces eerily orange in the torch light. “So… does anyone know any good ghost stories?” I asked weakly. Lesley, Beverley and Sahra glared at me but I took this to be a point in my favour since at least they’d stopped looking horrified. Inspector Lewis was hunched over, apparently fighting to keep hold of his dinner.

Molly had appeared at Thomas’s side at some point. I couldn’t have pinpointed when- Molly moves in mysterious ways, her… whatever it was that she did… to perform. I’d always known that she cared about Thomas, and she’d known him pretty much forever, as far as I could tell, but there was something so tender in her expression as she began to stroke his hair that I felt a lump in my throat. Thomas made no move to dislodge her hand; if anything, he leaned into it.

Alright, so I should probably have been trying to help him, somehow, too, but my legs just didn’t seem too keen on the idea of moving anywhere, right at that moment. Fortunately, Dr Walid had shown his own limbs just who was in charge, and he was checking Thomas’s pulse.

A few minutes after Mellenby left, the lights came back on and there was a collective sigh of relief. Inspector Lewis still looked a bit grey faced, but he was upright now, at least. Bev said a lot of words that I would have liked to hear her use in front of Tyburn.

I regained control of my body pretty sharpish when I heard Thomas grunt. I crossed the room to him- and no, I had no idea how I’d managed to end up back against the far wall after touching him- just in time to hear him mumble to Dr Walid. “... the bastard. Didn’t faint this time, though.” I grimaced in sympathy- from the look of him, I thought it might actually have been better if he had.

“I’m going to give you something for the pain,” Dr Walid announced, “arguments will only make me change my mind about where to stick the needle.”

Thomas’s lips twitched slightly, though his eyes remained closed. “Are you like this with all your patients?”

“My other patients have more sense,” he seemed to be getting more Glaswegian by the second.

Opening one eye, Thomas squinted at him as he unfastened his bag and hunted for something inside, “these days the vast majority of your patients are dead on arrival.”

“And yet they still exhibited more sense prior to ending up on my table- you see my problem, here?” he extracted a bottle and a syringe.

When I took hold of his arm this time I was relieved to find that I couldn’t sense Sutton at all. Dr Walid moved the blankets down around Thomas’s left hand side and undressed him enough that he could inject him (in the arm- he’s a Scot, not a sadist). The hand not holding the needle clasped around Thomas’s still covered shoulder as good stuff kicked in and the pain slowly drained from him.

Since Thomas had both his eyes closed again, he didn’t see the concern and relief on Walid’s face. I looked away and concentrated on Thomas’s cold hand in mine, “I don’t think you should try any more magic for a while.” I was surprised by how steady my voice sounded.

Thomas snorted softly. “I think you might be right,” he twined his fingers with mine. “Believe me, that was not an experience I care to repeat in a hurry.” He took a deep breath, coughed, grimaced and opened both of his eyes. “There was something here, in this room…” I must have looked as guilty as I felt because his eyes narrowed, “something you found in storage? Though how anything there could have come into Suttons’s possession…”

“Portraits. Two portraits, one Woodville-Gentle and one of David Mellenby. The lock doesn’t look like it’s been forced, but it’s hard to tell if anyone found another way to get in.” Thomas nodded and shuddered- I think I knew why. The wrongness I’d felt paled in comparison to what he must have gone through. 

“There are far too many unanswered questions for us to go about asking all of them at once. We need a plan of action and…” he frowned, scanning the room, “where is David?”

If I’d been writing a novel, this would have been the perfect moment for Mellenby to stride through the door (possibly with a hog-tied Sutton flung over his shoulder), but I wasn’t, and I told Thomas that I didn’t know where he was, but that he’d taken the portraits… somewhere. To do… something. 

From his position on the sofa- Dr Walid glared at him when he so much as looked twitchy, so he hadn’t attempted to get up- Thomas co-ordinated the research, suggesting book titles and chapters for us to read. Most of them seemed describe something like what I’d come to associate with voodoo, though my knowledge about that was limited to things I’d heard from my mum. And that James Bond film. And it quickly transpired that nothing I’d thought I’d known was accurate, in any case. This had happened a lot over the past couple of years- a lesser man might have developed a bit of a complex...

Going out on a limb, I mentioned the thought I’d had about Dorian Gray. Rather than telling me to stop being stupid and get on with the real research (the stuff in Latin), Thomas looked thoughtful. “I suppose it’s possible that something similar might have occurred. At least in principle. There’s a lot that would still need explaining, and there are no spells that I know of that could produce this effect but… as a working theory, it’s as good as any.”

Mellenby eventually reappeared, covered in soil and looking grim. I didn’t ask where he’d been since his clothes said ‘down a hole’ quite eloquently. “Done?” I asked.

With a solemn nod, Mellenby replied, “For now, yes.”


	21. Chapter 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments of all kinds welcome (well, maybe not -all- kinds, but close enough). The end of this fic is more nigh than it once was and comments keep me typing.
> 
> The next chapter is all ready to be posted but it might be a little later than usual (it'll appear at some point on Friday, I just can't be sure when).

In 2006, our Nobel Peace Prize nominated master of international diplomacy-by-force, Tony Blair, made a statement about his ‘sorrow’ at Britain’s involvement in the international slave trade while never actually saying that he was ‘sorry’ for it. My mum, who’s never missed an opportunity to Blair-bash, had a field day. “It’s not right, you know,” she told me at the dinner table as I tried valiantly to ignore her in favour of a chicken dish so spicy that it made my eyes water. “He should face up to the wrongs and repent, as the Lord Almighty is his judge.” God often got cracked out at such moments- like the good plates for unexpected company. I mumbled something in agreement for the sake of domestic harmony while dad shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

At the time I hadn’t thought it at all surprising that the Prime Minister hadn’t apologised for something that had been outlawed in Britain two hundred years previously, but lots of white men I knew seemed to feel guilty about it all the same- my dad included. In the years between then and now, I’ve encountered more of this historical guilt: German post-war babies apologetic about the Nazis; Generals lamenting the senseless deaths in the trenches of the First World War as if they had been involved in sending the poor sods over the top themselves; Catholic cardinals seeking forgiveness for the Spanish Inquisition (and not even once suggesting that they hadn’t expected it).

With great privilege, I realised, comes great responsibility. If you happen to be part of a select group fortunate enough not to have been persecuted at some point in history when others weren’t so lucky, then you’d better be pretty damned sure that you would have been siding with Schindler and his list over the Swastika. And who could know that for sure? The people of the past weren’t so different from us, even if they were all in black and white. And so it is that right thinking non-bastards err on the side of caution and say sorry for the sins of their great great grandparents on the off chance that they, too, might have proven fallible in the face of a daft moustache or an offer of unpaid labour.

Inspector Lewis hadn’t even been out of nappies when David Mellenby had died, but from the sheepish glances he kept shooting him over the top of the book he was studying you’d have thought he’d been at the Folly all along. His first reaction when they’d finally been introduced had been shock (‘you’re David Mellenby?’) followed directly by awe (‘ _you’re_ David Mellenby’) before the culpability-by-proxy had set in (‘you’re _David Mellenby_!’) Mellenby was studiously ignoring the waves of shame he must have felt washing in his direction- but then, he must have understood them all too well. He and several other Folly members had felt the link between similarity to a set group of people and complicitness with the atrocities they committed to such an extent that they’d all ended up dead by their own hands. Or, more accurately speaking, their own staffs.

So the tension in the room might not have been unexpected, but by two in the morning it had more than passed its sell by date and I was getting tired of pretending not to notice Dumbo standing in the corner. Thomas’s living room was cramped enough with all of us there as it was. “Inspector Lewis,” his head shot up in surprise and everyone else looked at me, too. Except for Thomas, who was in bed on doctor’s threat of swift vengeance. “Thomas thinks we’re going to need the Folly in on this and I agree. So does David,” Mellenby was eying me keenly, now, and had quirked his eyebrow slightly when I used his first name. He knew exactly what I was doing and he knew I knew he knew.

“Do you think you could take him there, tomorrow… today” I amended, remembering the time, “introduce him to a few people he could explain things to? And stick around to make sure they listen? ”

Lewis sat up straighter on the stool he’d claimed in the absence of other options. Strike one. I continued, “you never know, maybe they’ll be forced to admit to some serious mismanagement; stranger things have happened.”

Lewis looked pissed, then, and for the first time in several hours it wasn’t directed inward. “They had better,” he said in a way that reminded me- and probably (/hopefully) himself- that he was a master practitioner, a Detective Inspector and no slouch in either field. I began to feel slightly sorry for the pitiful buggers at the Folly who’d be met by their joint wrath… The feeling passed quite swiftly, however, and then I only regretted that I wouldn’t be able to witness the inevitable hell that would break lose first hand.

I yawned and looked around to the other side of the room, meeting only Molly and Lesley’s eyes. Sahra and Bev were fast asleep on the sofa and Dr Walid was in with Thomas. Presumably getting him to stay safely asleep through the power of concerned ire alone.

“I guess I’ll be calling in sick to work,” not that it would have been much of a lie. I was exhausted, my back and neck ached with tension and I was probably already suffering the effects of malnutrition, having not eaten since breakfast. And even then I’d only had a slice of toast. Without jam.

Mellenby’s brow creased in a way that indicated either deep thought or constipation. “You know Sutton’s _signare_.”

“Unfortunately,” I sounded less than enthusiastic, because I was.

He sighed, “then you should go to work. We must work on the hypothesis that I appeared at the building site because the source of whatever power we’re dealing with is near. You will not be suspected of anything- you have a legitimate reason for being there. I don’t intend for you to engage with him, merely let us know if you sense him.”

Inspector Lewis frowned, “I don’t like this. Sutton has seen Peter’s face before- he’s not likely to have forgotten.”

“It was pretty dark but… yeah,” if I could see him- not an experience I wanted to repeat in a hurry- then he could see me.

“Peter will have the element of surprise on his side.”

Inspector Lewis groaned, “the Nightingale is going to kill me.”

Mellenby grinned, “I promise to intervene if he tries, and I have good reason to suspect that he won’t kill me. Several, in fact.”

 _I_ wasn’t worried about  _Thomas_ killing me. Sutton, on the other hand… My mind screamed ‘not a chance’ but somehow I heard myself saying “I’ll do it.”

And so, I did.


	22. Chapter 22

I got a few hours sleep, at least, before setting off on my suicide mission. I was briefly tempted to follow up on Mellenby’s suggestion that it might be useful to take Toby along to the building site, but I felt it might not go down too well with my firm. Even if I did offer his services with the digging. Besides, I was supposed to be inconspicuous.

I was only half listening to the report the site manager was giving me when something she said caught my attention, “sorry- could you just repeat that last bit?”

She sighed, “I know, I know. After weeks of _come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough_ , they’re afraid of a ‘creepy alleyway’” she didn’t quite use finger quotations for that, but her tone suggested that if she hadn’t been holding a clipboard she might have. “I told them that they’re all mouth and no trousers.”

Ji-min McIndoe (known by her friends as Jimmi and by any contractor with an ounce of sense as Sir) had been born in South Korea and raised in Aberdeen before moving to England with her husband, a card carrying and kilt wearing Scot who had had the misfortune to get lumbered with a job with the wrong government. She was tiny, standing at five-foot-nothing, tops, in sturdy work boots and hard hat, but what she lacked in stature she more than made up for in the ability to strike the fear of God into even the hardiest skin-headed soul with a single glare.

“Creepy in what way?” I asked cautiously.

Jimmi frowned- she’s sharp as they come and had bonded with Thomas at our firm’s Christmas party over their shared inexplicable passions for botany and the Telegraph’s cryptic crosswords. She’d also met Inspector Lewis on a site the couple of years back where there’d been an unfortunate death-by-mutant-cat-boy (or ‘chimera,’ as they’re known in the magical trade- Sutton’s handiwork), so she knew ‘Folly business’ when it trespassed on her territory.

“Nothing like _that_ ,” she stated emphatically, and I didn’t need to ask what ‘that’ was “I’ve been down there myself and there’s nothing lurking in the shadows- it’s just that there are a lot of them for something to be lurking in.”

“I’ll go and check it out,” I said without enthusiasm, “I doubt our guys want addicts shooting up in a dark alley outside their shiny new office building. We might have to redevelop there, as well.”

I don’t think she fell for it, but she had minions to manage and was clearly bored of the conversation, “suit yourself. It’s right over there,” she pointed, “scream if you want to get laughed at.”

Now, I’m as willing to do stupid things to avoid humiliation as any man, but on this occasion I felt that there were greater things at risk even than my pride, so I proceeded with caution.

Every few steps on the way to the alley, I ducked down to get a sense for any _vestigium_ (occasionally under the pretext of tying my- non-existent, since I was wearing slip ons-  shoelaces if I thought someone might be watching). At first there was nothing that I hadn’t already encountered on previous visits to the site, but as I approached I began to feel a sense of foreboding that I didn’t think was a result of my overactive and sleep-deprived imagination. In the words of a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I had a bad feeling about this.

I touched the concrete at the entrance to the alley and I felt it- the glint of a cutthroat razor and a dog’s vicious snarl. Sutton’s _signare_. I stepped back and swallowed hard. It was weak, I told myself reasonably, which meant that he wasn’t _necessarily_ lurking around the corner waiting to pounce (or to get one of his chimera to do the pouncing), but there was still a large enough probability that he might be that I thought retreat would be the better part of valour.

Not wanting to court mockery too closely, I didn’t quite run away, but I did walk with a very active sense of purpose. I was already running through my future phone conversation with Thomas in my head- “on the downside, he’s definitely been here; on the plus side, he’s not right here, right now”- when I absolutely-did-not-run headfirst into a man in a suit. I stumbled backwards and landed, unceremoniously, on my bum. A half-stifled snort announced Jimmi’s presence behind me.

The man was giving me a bland look which might have been apologetic, annoyed or anything in between. I thought I recognised him from somewhere, but posh white boys all look much the same to me when I’m sprawled on my arse at their feet- generally metaphorically, but not on this occasion. He was probably someone from the company we were being hired by, come to sneer at our lack of progress.

I couldn’t pinpoint why, exactly, but there was something about this man’s presence here that put me on edge; something other than the fact he’d not even had the good grace to wobble a bit when we’d collided. He was blond, chinless and looking down his nose at me- again, quite literally.

“I’m terribly sorry,” he said in a way that made me doubt his sincerity. Then he offered me a hand up and, for want of a logical reason not to, I accepted it.

I stumbled back and almost fell again and this time so did he. I could see Jimmi looking at us in either confusion or annoyance- most likely both- out of the corner of my eye, but right then it was all I could do to keep breathing.

Anyone who sensed my magical signature would be able to tell that I was Thomas Nightingale’s apprentice, my _signare_ being a weaker echo of his own. There is also an unmistakable link between a practitioner’s _signare_ and their _vestigia_ ; it’s a bit hard to describe- even Nightingale doesn’t really understand much about all of this stuff- but to use an edible example, the _signare_ of a wizard’s spell is like the first bite of a bacon sandwich but the _vestigia_ you get when you get close to them is like the imagined taste you get when you smell of bacon frying. Fainter, not quite as tangible, but unmistakeable.

When I’d touched this man’s hand, it definitely wasn’t bacon that I sensed.  Instead I had flashes of razor wire, blood, maniacal laughter and, unmistakable to me by now, the looming impression of a cut throat blade and the snarl of a large dog.

This was the Nazi golden boy I’d first seen in portrait form. Albert Woodville-Gentle- Sutton’s guru in the grotesque. And now he knew who I was, too.

I tried to stay calm, though my heart was thudding in my chest. I took a step back, right into a protesting Jimmi.

Woodville-Gentle eyed me coolly, “won’t you come with me? There’s something I’d like for you to see.”

I had had some experience with glamours. The strongest I’d experienced up until this point had come from Sutton, back the days when he practised his creepiness under the official standard of the Folly. I was no slouch when it came to resisting by now, but this time the compulsion was far greater than anything I’d felt before, and I found myself nodding, my legs moving to follow the man though my mind screamed for them to stop.

My fingers, on the other hand, were my own. I reached for my phone and typed blindly, praying that the gods of autocorrect would look kindly on me: “Kidnap het kelp tell Thomas it gently in alley.” Given the circumstances, I was pleased enough with my effort and I made as much of a show of dropping my phone as I could, knowing that Jimmi was watching and hoping that Woodville-Gentle didn’t have eyes in the back of his head.

That done, I followed the undead madman with forced meekness to whatever fate he had in store for me.


	23. Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which the author cunningly avoids having to write action scenes with the help of tea.
> 
> Comments are gold, chocolates and flowers for my soul.

I’m good at resisting glamours. Good, and getting better. Beverley’s sister, Tyburn, can bend politicians in Whitehall to her alarmingly bloodthirsty will (she’s especially hard on anyone she considers to be a ‘traitor,’ though as far as I could gather she hadn’t actually hanged anyone… yet. Reading up about the history or her river had given me several unsettled nights). She had, however, failed to get me to so much as open the door for her; it’s not that I generally slam doors in the faces of women- or men, for that matter- but I’ve always balked at the idea of being ordered about. Just ask my mum. Whatever spell had been used on me on this occasion, I reasoned it was of above average strength- and not just for the sake of my vanity.

Through the haze of panic and irritation, I registered that the alley was at the centre of two concrete shrines to Brutalism. Nineteen seventies, I’d have guessed if I had a gun to my head- which I suppose at the time I did, but not in a manner that would be assisted by architectural trivia. These were not, given the affluence of the area, cheap builds designed with a focus on functionality over style. The sins of the architect were deeper than that- much deeper- these beige-grey travesties were a _statement_. ‘Money, I might have,’ I could sense the designer’s intentions like  _vestigia_ , ‘but, lo, observe how anti-bourgeois I am. Regard the honesty of my expensive attempt to make these buildings look as cheap as humanly possible.’

Now more irate with some probably-dead someone and their crimes against cement than I was with the definitely-not-dead-enough Woodville-Gentle, I had the opportunity for self-reflection. The first point of psychological interest was that I do, perhaps, have a somewhat skewed sense of priorities. The second was that my above-average capacity for distraction was for once proving useful. I couldn’t brush the glamour off, not entirely, but I did manage to deviate from my path, shifting slightly to the left and removing the ever present standard-issue Sharpie from my pocket as I did so, sliding it up my sleeve, and dragging it along the wall as we turned the corner. In the absence of bread crumbs, it was the best I could come up with.

And, as it turns out, beige-grey walls have their uses, after all.  Fortunately, my captor didn’t notice, his focus elsewhere- possibly on the necessity of maintaining his lure on me, but more probably on whatever evil schemes he was plotting as we walked. An internal monologue no doubt punctuated by variations on a theme of pantomime cackling.

We continued our journey through several winding side streets which gave me the opportunity to marvel at the Sharpie’s clearly abundant ink capacity and to worry that maybe my thin trail might not be obvious enough to aid rescue attempts. It would have been much easier if I could cast werelights at various points on our trek and leave evidence of my _signare_ , but whatever the good guys could detect, the more immediately present bad guy could, too, and he was clearly more than powerful enough to take me without breaking a sweat. Best to err on the side of non-magical caution, given the circumstances.

Eventually we reached what looked to be a warehouse of some sort. We walked through a large, industrial carpark and past several corrugated huts. The whole place was deserted- both a blessing and a curse. Our path to reach this point had been so convoluted that I wouldn’t have been able to find my way back myself without the Sharpie line, but then I don’t suppose criminals usually signpost their evil lairs. Not unless they’re fictional, that is. Or really, really rich and powerful. Or mad.

“Here we are.” He held the door open for me. I made a point of not thanking him. “Come in, come in,” he said as if I had a choice, “you must be tired after our long walk.” I felt a shivering sensation which I had enough experience to associate with the activation of certain security wards, and an all-too familiar figure emerged from an adjacent room.

“Ah, Gareth,” Woodville-Gentle addressed him in tones of plummy joviality, “perhaps you might lay on some tea and cake for our guest?”

For a moment, Sutton and I were united in a common incredulity, both frowning at Woodville-Gentle in disbelief. I saw a flicker of annoyance cross his otherwise deceptively placid features. “Gareth, some tea, please.”

He didn’t cast a second glamour, he didn’t need to. “Yes, Master,” Sutton responded eventually, bowing slightly though he still wore a pinched look of disapproval when he straightened out again. I snorted, both at the title and the display.

Both men glared at me and I carefully neutralised my expression, deciding it probably wasn’t especially wise to upset the powerful magical psychopaths- especially not on their home turf. Even if I’d now no longer be able to look at one of them without being reminded of a petulant Anakin Skywalker.

“Take a seat.” Woodville-Gentle motioned to a chair and, though I sensed the compulsion, I felt like I could probably have resisted it on this occasion. I could almost isolate the individual strands of magic binding me to obedience and it seemed that I would have been able to brush them off if I pushed hard enough. Since there was little point showing my hand at this point in a stubborn refusal to submit, I obeyed my kidnapper like a good little victim and looked around me.

“Nice place you’ve got here.” I couldn’t have refrained from sarcasm if my life depended on it- and since at the time it might have, I know I’m being literal. This hideout was the sort of place that should be used by the police as a prime example of how crime doesn’t pay. It smelt of dry rot, wet rot, and I-don’t-even-want-to-know-what rot.

Just to add insult to captivity, the cake that Sutton brought out was madeira. He set a tray of teapot, mismatched tea cups and repulsively bland, dry cake down on the table in front of me, pouring the tea when prompted.

“Do help yourself.” I felt the strands of Woodville-Gentle’s magic tighten once more, but this time I knew I had to fight them. The last thing I needed was an obligation to this man.

I felt sweat prickle on my brow with the effort of keeping my hands clenched around the chair legs, but I didn’t budge. “No thanks, Bertie, I don’t take tea from strangers.”

He frowned and the compulsion grew so strong it threatened to choke me. I groaned and didn’t fully regain my senses until I felt warm liquid pass my lips. _Fuck_ , I thought, but rather than feeling like I was now bound to Woodville-Gentle forever, for better or worse (and more likely the latter), instead I felt a sensation similar to that experienced on the rare occasions I’d managed to hook a duck at a fair.

I remembered researching the nature of obligations and, though the sources of information were slim- practitioners being a curiously incurious sort on the whole- from what I could gather, they were etiquette spells for making sure that little wizards were appropriately appreciative of what they had been given. The casting of glamours, on the other hand, was considered ‘ungentlemanly’ by most right thinking practitioners, and so it seemed I might have found a glimmer of hope, after all, in the form of an extremely British sounding theoretical loophole. I might have something to thank the Folly for, after all.

I’d never previously thought much of the concept of someone being ‘hoisted by their own petard,’ but somehow it came to mind now. That, and the less literary but equally emphatic response of, ‘hah, gotcha.’

Woodville-Gentle didn’t flinch, however, and neither did Sutton. It seemed they hadn’t noticed that something had shifted. I knew that I had to play this right, bide my time and not play the obligation card too early, no matter how tempting it might seem.  I also knew that I needed to stop using unhelpful game metaphors in my thought processes about perilous situations, but that was a more difficult habit to get out of.

For now, it seemed it was down to me to be the civilised one. I just about managed not to make my little finger stick out as I sipped my tea; what I did do, however, was remark: “what lovely weather we’re having.” This earned me a glare. I felt smug.


	24. Chapter 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How many chapters can I evade action for? Many, it seems...

Sutton looked restless and kept shooting glances at Woodville-Gentle as if trying to read his thoughts. I tried that, too, despite Thomas’s repeated protestations that telepathy was impossible, but try as I might all I got from his face was the vague impression that a light was on, but nobody was home. Since I knew him to be a mad scientist slash evil genius mastermind, I decided not to trust my eyes on this.

“Master, if I might have a word?” Sutton’s head twitched in a manner which could have been a gesture towards another room or the beginnings of a stroke. It was probably the former, but I’m an eternal optimist so I kept my options open.

Woodville-Gentle merely eyed him with the same unreadable expression he had used on me right after I’d- quite literally- bumped into him. “Anything you have to say can be said in front of our guest.”

For the first time since I’d been forced away from the building site against my will, I felt properly frightened. Before now, this had been a surreal and almost farcical experience: kidnapped by a ghost, forced across a part of London that seemed intent upon upsetting every one of my architectural sensibilities and now I was sat drinking tea with the most mannerly criminals this side of the Victorian era.

But the implications of what Woodville-Gentle had said oh-so-politely sent a very real chill down my spine. ‘Say what you like. He won’t be able to pass anything on.’

“Why have you brought me here?” I asked, finding it suddenly imperative that I control the conversation before either of them could say anything to each other about their plots and schemes that might make them have to get me out of the way any sooner than was already planned.

Woodville-Gentle took another sip of his own tea. Sitting there, stiff backed with legs primly crossed, in his good suit, with his old fashioned hair and his Euro-Fascist friendly face, he looked like an advert for the Folly in its heyday. ‘Are you white, male, classically educated and entitled to the point of obsession? Then join the Folly: where magic lives, even if your brain cells don’t. Terms and conditions apply. Members must be minor aristocracy or over.’

From Thomas’s description of the weeks and months following the discovery of Woodville-Gentle’s involvement with All Things Foul and Nasty, the Folly’s main objections to his practises hadn’t been that they were morally repugnant and really, really wrong, but rather that they had brought the Folly under the scrutiny of the common folk of the media, and, even more unforgivably, had been operated out of _Soho_ , of all places. They certainly wouldn’t make much of this warehouse.

Regarding me coolly, Woodville-Gentle apparently decided he would humour me with an answer after all. “My dear boy, you ask that as if you believe this to have been my intention all along. No, no- nothing of the sort. Though, with you being who you are and myself being who I am… I’m sure you understand that I couldn’t just let you return to your Master. Have no fear, however; we have uses for you, yet.” Well, wasn’t that a reassuring statement?

“Oh good,” I replied without inflection and took another drink. At least the tea wasn’t poisoned, I supposed.

Taking a bite of cake with obvious gusto- even madeira must seem like a treat when you haven’t eaten in forty years- he looked me up and down. He didn’t speak again until he had swallowed his mouthful. _Of course_. “Yes, you will do very well. So many of the fae are merely not up to the task of being drained, but you are strong and fit and have the Nightingale’s magic. Yes, you shall work out nicely.”

I snorted and tried to cover up the way my pulse seemed to be trying to set a new land speed record, “glad to be of assistance. And what will be the purpose of this… draining?” My mouth was dry, and I’d run out of tea.

Woodville-Gentle noticed. “Oh forgive me, where are my manners?” He poured me another cup. “As for your question, you’ll be serving a higher cause, I assure you.”

I sipped at my fresh tea for want of anything better to do. That, and it’s considered a worse than criminal offence in Britain to waste it. I knew that I had to keep Woodville-Gentle talking to give the cavalry enough time to arrive before any actual ‘draining’ could occur. “Why do you need me? My Master’s much more powerful, and he’s still alive, why don’t you just drain him more?”

Referring to Thomas as my ‘Master’- something I never do, for so many reasons- gave me the distance I needed to appear sufficiently ready to sacrifice him to save my own skin. That didn’t make it a comfortable feeling, but I reminded myself that it would absolutely have been what he would have instructed me to do in a situation like this.

It brought to mind one particular occasion when I noticed that a spell I was in the process of casting was just about to misfire in his direction so I tried to shift the _forma_ so that it headed towards myself instead, only to have Thomas step in and… I noticed, belatedly, that Woodville-Gentle was speaking again and I remembered a second instruction that Thomas would have given me: _focus, Peter._

“... so he’s just not fit for purpose,” I blinked, hoping I hadn’t missed anything too vital. Sutton was frowning down at me. He did ‘henchman’ well, I’ll give him that; it seemed to be a role he was better suited to than sewer dwelling sociopath-in-chief.

I thought fast, not an activity I’m necessarily renowned for. “But how did you manage to drain him at all? He’s really powerful- surely that makes you even more so?” It is a truth universally acknowledged in every film, ever, that bad guys and girls are all massive narcissists who can be defeated by the subtle application of ego stroking. My attempt was less than subtle, but still, I was hoping these tropes applied in real life, too- though the jury seemed less unanimous about this. Sutton’s frown intensified.

Woodville-Gentle appeared amused. “The Nightingale has always had an Achilles heel. In the form of his Patroclus, if you will. ‘Τὴν δὲ μέγ΄ ὀχθήσας προσέφη πόδας ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς· αὐτίκα τεθναίην͵ ἐπεὶ οὐκ ἄρ΄ ἔμελλον ἑταίρῳ κτεινομένῳ ἐπαμῦναι.’” I had no idea what he was saying, my Ancient Greek being even less existent than my Latin (which I still mostly knew from gaming, despite more than two years of mostly patient tuition).

As far as I can tell from the alphabet, the Greeks spoke mostly in Maths. I _like_ Maths- I do- I just don’t think it has any business being a linguistic foundation.

Clearly having expected a response from me other than an expression of blank confusion, Woodville-Gentle translated in a tone that suggested he would have liked to have prefaced it with a tut and a scathing comment about my sad lack of linguistic nous. “ _And so Achilles spoke: ‘would that I could die, since I failed to protected the one dearest to me at his slaying_.’ Though even before his actual demise, poor, sentimental Thomas was always trying to save Mellenby for all kinds of little deaths: his theories, his reputation, his sanity. He failed on all counts, of course, but he would never have stopped trying. Compassion for another is a great weakness; really I’m doing the man a favour, putting him out of his long misery.”

I bit my tongue to refrain from telling him just what I thought of his ‘considerate’ gesture. “Mellenby?” I asked, aiming to put as much confusion into my voice as possible. It wasn’t as difficult as it might have been had I not had the sudden, sick thought that maybe Mellenby had been in on this all along, that he had just been biding his time, spying and waiting for an opportunity to strike when my back was turned. A time like now, for instance, when he had been the one to send me away...


	25. Chapter 25

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The tea party continues. 
> 
> TRIGGER WARNING: the evil man's racist and I felt really terrible for writing it, but I'll make sure he suffers.
> 
> Have I mentioned how much I love comments? Because I really do.

I tried to get my heart and stomach under control enough to actually listen to what Woodville-Gentle said this time. “David Mellenby. He was my Master in the _ars magica_ \- not a bad scientific brain, but far too wet to realise his ambitions. It was through him that I found a way to get to the Nightingale, and here I am, now. Not that he would ever have condoned it, had he known, but then that was _his_ weakness. _Morality_ ,” he said the word as if it was a curse, “it did for him in the end, as I understand it. Not being able to cope with what _I_ had done. The old fool actually thought that he had played a role in my plans- as if he could even have begun to comprehend the mastery of my...”

I let the white noise of his megalomania wash over me for a moment as I basked in the relief of having been wrong about Mellenby. Again. He had had nothing to do with what had happened to himself and to Thomas- or at least, he hadn’t been involved with his own consent- and Woodville-Gentle certainly had no idea that he had returned as well.

Sensing Woodville-Gentle’s declaration of his own genius winding to a long-overdue end, I swallowed just enough of my pride to allow me to ask my next question. “But how did you do it?” I didn’t need to fake my interest, but I deserved an Oscar for my performance as someone who gave a shit about just how clever he’d been. I even managed to sound _impressed_.

“Thomas fancied himself as something of a painter.” I tried to maintain an expression of mild curiosity rather than revealing the more than mild pique I felt at the veiled insult against my (very talented, thank you very much) partner. “I offered myself as a subject for a couple of portraits, though I was forced into hiding by those blind old fools at the Folly before I could sit for the second. I spelled the canvas he used myself with a _forma_ I had designed to remain dormant and undetectable until my apprentice should activate it.”

He seemed to think that that was quite enough of an explanation, and picked up his plate and slice of cake again before checking his watch as if he was waiting for something.

I gave over the last remnants of my integrity and gushed, “wow.” Yes, I actually said ‘ _wow_ ’… “That’s like that book… about the man who kept a painting in his attic,” he gave me a pitying and slightly pained look which showed that my efforts at feigned awe and ignorance had not been in vain, “you managed to link yourself to your portrait? Even Thomas couldn’t do that…” I felt slightly nauseous, even if this display was for the greater good. _What kind of sycophant do you want me to be?_

“I believe you are referring to The Picture of Dorian Gray. A tawdry comparison, at best, but I suppose impressive for one of your…” he looked me up and down, bland expression animated slightly now by distaste, “ _standing_.” I bristled and deciding that it would be a very great pleasure when, at some point in the not too distant future, I found an opportunity to punch this man in the face.

One thing I’d learnt from years of interacting with pillocks who think they know everything is to let them keep thinking that and use their obliviousness to my own advantage. I shrugged, “I saw the film, innit.” Yeah, bruv, _innit_ . I could feel the ghost of my mum’s hand clipping my ear, _“Peter, I did not raise you to speak like this. You should listen to your cousin Morris. He’s not common like those friends of yours- he’s going to be a dentist.”_

Woodville-Gentle quirked an eyebrow, “indeed. However, unlike with the ill-fated Mr Gray, my plan involved rather more erudition on my part, and was elegantly executed rather than the subject of mere fate.” _Elegantly executed?_ I thought. _I think you’ll find that’s a split infinitive, you pompous prick._

“How did you execute it?” I asked, manfully resisting the urge to throttle him.

Sutton was still standing, but I saw him shift his weight from foot to foot out of the corner of my eye. “You talk too much,” he commented, his tone as clipped as his accent. I knew he was on to me. And if he was, so was Woodville-Gentle.

However, the mind of a villain is a complex thing. Woodville-Gentle examined his watch for a second time before sitting back in his chair. “Gareth, there’s no need to be churlish. And this part was your triumph, too. My former apprentice having suffered… an unfortunate accident… It was very felicitous that young Mr Sutton discovered my papers and took such an admirable interest in my work. He activated the spell for me. Magic flowed through canvas from artist to subject and, though my earthly body is no more, here I am.”

My eyes felt heavy, and I thought that the combination of lack of sleep and the tedium of being bragged at was finally catching up with me. My vision was also blurring slightly, and my head nodded a few times before I realised that something was very, very wrong.  I also realised that Sutton hadn’t touched the tea- and that Woodville-Gentle, who had, was already too dead to be drugged.

“Ah, right on time,” Woodville-Gentle announced cheerfully. “So good of you to partake of your refreshments so dutifully, though I do hope you didn’t have too much. “ He didn’t seem too bothered by the fact that I might have, and my mind was suddenly too foggy to ask what, exactly, it was I might have had too much of. “Still, I don’t believe Gareth made the calculations with human chimpanzees- to use Charles Kingsley’s charming terminology-  in mind, so you might just be in luck.”

If I could have controlled my limbs enough to lunge at him, I would have. On reflection, it was probably a good thing that I couldn’t. Even now, faced with the unpleasant reality that I was soon to be facing an unpleasant reality, my mind still couldn’t help but be distracted by vague memories of a particularly objectionable form of Victorian pseudo-science that used Darwin’s theories of evolution to suggest that some people were just more worthy of life and liberty than others.

Looking at Woodville-Gentle then, through the haze of whatever it was I’d been given, I was inclined to agree- though not for the reasons they would have suggested.

Just before I blacked out, I had time for a little more guilt. David Mellenby, posh, well-educated Victorian scientist and former lover of one Thomas Nightingale though he was, had been nothing but respectful towards me and supportive of my relationship. I was beginning to realise just what a gift horse I had looked in the mouth. Perhaps I should bake him a cake, if I somehow managed to get out of there alive.

 _Not_ madeira.


	26. Chapter 26

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've almost finished writing this now: another five chapters ready to go after this one, and about four(?) more to write. 
> 
> If you have any thoughts- about anything at all- I'd love to hear them!

_Thomas was straddling me, doing impressive things with tongue and teeth that I definitely needed to commit to memory for future reference. Not to be recalled during dull work meetings, however- I’d learnt that lesson the hard way._ Very _hard… I tore my attention away from the unsexy recollection of my boss’s suspicious expression as I made my excuses and scuttled away, briefcase strategically placed, and instead concentrated on the sensation of Thomas’s mouth at my throat. I wanted to run my fingers through his hair but found, to my surprise, that I couldn’t move my arms._

_I felt a thrill of arousal and fear when I realised they’d been cuffed to the rich rosewood of Thomas’s antique headboard. I wasn’t sure what surprised me more: Thomas’s unusual power play or the fact he’d risked damage to his furniture. I wasn’t afraid of Thomas, or of anything he might do to me (in fact, I awaited those possibilities with, if anything, over-eager anticipation), but I was definitely alarmed by the fact I had somehow failed to notice having been trapped._

_I tested the cuffs again, quite vigorously, and hissed as cold metal dug into my wrists. Thomas stopped the very pleasant thing he had been doing to my ear, pulling away slightly to look at me with an expression of concerned curiosity. I looked back sheepishly and was just about to ask- or possibly beg- for him to continue, when his face shifted. I watched in horror as his skin turned pale, taut and waxy, the light in his eyes fading even as his gaze still met mine. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t seem to find the breath. “No…” I gasped instead, “no!”_

_That his features were still animated made this deathmask all the more horrific. His now drooping left eye blinked, but the glaze didn’t clear from it. By now, I’d seen more than my fair share of corpses- recognised the unmistakable expression of eyes that no longer contained the glimmer of life- but until now they’d all been safely confined to Dr Walid’s mortuary. Such an expression had no right to be found in Thomas’s eyes, in Thomas’s bed._

_“No… you can’t be… what can I do?” I couldn’t bear to look at him. I couldn’t bear to look away. There had to be_ something _I could do to make this right and if there was, I needed him to tell me._

_His head tilted and his grey lips twitched. I felt my stomach roil and swallowed hard. “You have to wake up,” he said, in a remarkably reasonable tone for one so unreasonably deformed._

_“But I_ am _awake!” I shouted in frustration, trying to pull my arms free once more._

 _As suddenly as I had first noticed it, the resistance was gone. “Peter,” Thomas took my newly liberated hands in his own, his touch ice cold, “you have to_ wake _._ up _.”_

_And so, I did._

______________________________

 

My heart was still pounding with the terror of the nightmare, but the drugs in my system made me slow to react and I had time to think before my body did something impulsive. I noticed that I was lying down, but on something far too cold and hard to be a bed. Memories of Dr Walid’s medical slabs still fresh in my mind, I was quick to make the grisly connection.

Taking careful breaths, I kept my eyes closed and concentrated on my other senses. I could hear noises- sharp cracks, like fireworks, but seeming far off. I could smell chemicals and I didn’t think I was imagining the formaldehyde among them. Trying very hard not to think too much about what use it might have been intended to be put to, I cleared my mind as best I could and tried to get a feel for any _vestigia_. There was a sharp tang of old magic, but nothing recent as far as I could tell.

Confident that I wasn’t currently under observation- though not quite confident enough, yet, to risk looking around- I tested the fingers of my left hand, and then my right. I heard the soft jangle of metal against metal as my right wrist twitched, and cracked my eyes open enough that I could squint down at the… bracelet? cuff?... around my lower arm. I wasn’t tied down to anything, physically, but I remembered a conversation I’d once had with my friendly neighbourhood detective and fellow covert-apprentice, Sahra Guleed, about restraining magical prisoners.

“But don’t they just… walk out?” I’d asked, and Sahra’s expression had became one I recognised well from the faces of parents, teachers and Thomases after a lifetime of persistent inquisitiveness. “Thomas can open doors with locks far more secure than those on your average police cell”- or, at least, more secure than the ones I’d seen in cop shows- “and he doesn’t even have to _try_.” I began to think that maybe that sounded a lot more incriminating than I’d intended.

Sahra’s eyebrows had shot right up into her hijab. “ _What_?” I responded, defensively. “Dr Walid got locked out of his lab.” I might have seen him use the technique a few more times than that, but moving swiftly on… “and surely you’ve seen your boss do something similar? Maybe even done it yourself?” I hesitated a little. Again, most of my experience of police procedure involved watching melancholy detectives kick down doors while doing a lot of gruff shouting and crying internally.

Seeming resigned to dialogue, she sighed and gave me my answer. “We have special cuffs. They…” she groped about for a word, “ _insulate_ ” she settled on, looking at me to make sure I was suitably impressed by her attempt to ‘science things up’ for my benefit, “so that the practitioner’s magic can’t get through. The device can only be removed by someone else.”

Never one to pass up an opportunity to stock up on random (mostly useless) facts, I pressed on, “what happens if the prisoner tries to use magic when it’s on?”

Sahra looked a little grim. “At first, nothing. Usually they get the message soon enough.”

I hadn’t needed to ask what would happen to them if they didn’t. I’ve seen Walid’s impressive brain collection.

Not wanting to risk turning my mind to cauliflower mush, I attempted to cast a very feeble werelight just to test my theory, pushing the _forma_ out of my mind as soon as I had confirmed that it wasn’t working. I wouldn’t be able to use magic again until someone removed the device.

Though I knew now that I was definitely alone, I couldn’t quite open my eyes to more than slits and my vision was foggy. I felt hungover- tongue too big for mouth, head filled with cotton wool, stomach less than impressed. I tested my legs, found that they, too, were able to move, even if they seemed reluctant to do so.

Gradually, I began to sit up, dizziness making me cautious. I couldn’t risk falling over and incapacitating myself further, especially since I’d belatedly realised the probable source of the ‘fireworks’ I could hear outside.

When the room stopped swimming enough for me to focus on details, I identified it as a lab. Though I wouldn’t exactly have said I was feeling _well_ , exactly, I felt drugged rather than drained and at that moment I was willing to take such small victories where I could find them.

Carefully ignoring the ‘whatevers’ in jars and cases dotted around, I swung about and eased my legs gingerly down to the tiled floor, careful not to put too much weight on them too soon. I wobbled a bit. The bangs outside sounded more numerous and closer together.

I took one tentative step forward, and then another. My head pounded, but at least it wasn’t pickled.


	27. Chapter 27

It was a good thing my progress towards the door was slow, because it meant that I was well clear of it when it was blown off its hinges.

I had many options: I could have jumped out of the way and adopted one of the numerous defensive positions Thomas had insisted I learn; could have grabbed something from the nearby table and used it as a weapon; could have ducked down behind one of the heavy filing cabinets to my left; could even have stood at the side of the room and pretended to be an exhibit. I did, however, do none of these things, instead opting for the ever popular ‘freeze uselessly like a startled rabbit’ approach.

Fortunately for me, the person on the other side of the newly minted hole froze as well. “Mr Grant?” she asked. She was a very well dressed- if dusty- white woman, had a posh accent and could make explosions happen with her mind. I guessed she was from the Folly.

“Err…” it took me a while to remember the correct response, and even when I had my reply came out more like a question than an answer, “yes?”

She looked me up and down with a frown which almost made me do the same, just to make sure all my limbs really were still present and correct. I probably would have, too, if the pounding of my head and the swimming of my vision hadn’t been joined by a ringing in my ears. “Can you move, sir?”

I definitely didn’t know the answer to that question, so I remained silent.

Ms Exploding-Doors approached me cautiously and hooked an arm around my back. She had a first name, it seemed. “Victoria”- that was it. Ms Victoria Exploding-Doors then helped me to stagger through the wall and out into the corridor where a number of similar holes awaited us.

She had an umbrella hooked under her left arm. Either this also acted as a staff or the weather had deteriorated significantly since my capture. Or she was just that much of a posh British stereotype. It was hard to tell.

With all the grace of a pantomime cow, we made our way through several further walls. Then I had to grunt and push my rescuer and her expensive shoes and suit away so that I could bring up the contents of my stomach without fear of  having to sell my soul to afford the cleaning bill.

To her credit, she didn’t so much as flinch as I vomited tea and bile onto the concrete floor. When I was done and was taking a breather with my head against the wonderfully cool wall, she passed me a handkerchief and wrapped her arm around me again. I could feel her breast against my side, by no means an unpleasant sensation, and also an impressive amount of firm muscle.

I must have commented on one or both of these things because she laughed, “and all without upsetting the line of my suit.” I was still none-the-wiser about what I had actually said.

I began to feel a bit better as we approached fresher air, eventually stepping through a final wall and into daylight which had me blinking and making an uncoordinated attempt at shielding my eyes.

Victoria Exploding-Doors looked around, assessing the situation. I looked around, too, and that’s when I saw the fireballs. And the fact parts of the warehouse no longer had a roof. And the craters. “I have to get you to the car, sir. Dr Walid’s waiting for you with the Nightingale and…” she trailed off, “it’s not far.”

I froze. “Thomas is here?” She nodded distractedly, still trying to find a safe path. Even in my still slightly drug addled state, I knew that the last thing I wanted was for _Thomas_ to be here. Have I mentioned the craters?

“Are those yours?” I motioned to them.

“It’s hard to tell, sir,” she replied. Fair enough, I supposed, it’s not like either party had signed their work.

She began to move and I had little choice but to move with her. I felt the ground shaking and it took me a moment to realise that this time it wasn’t my imagination. I wondered what spells they were using to make it do that, but decided that it was probably better that I didn’t find out the answer.

The route we were taking led to a dead end which led, in turn, some creative swearing on the part of Victoria. One of the buildings I had hated with such passion on the way to the warehouse had crumbled in our path- I suppose that was irony or poetic justice or maybe it was pathetic fallacy. _I know how you feel_ , I mused, regarding the rubble with what I suspected was a similar expression of professional morbidity to the one Dr Walid wears when examining an interesting corpse.

“Can you use magic?” she asked. I wasn’t sure what she was angling for, precisely, or how much she already knew, so I didn’t answer right away.

This could have all been an elaborate trap to wheedle out an unsanctioned apprentice (unlikely, but, given what I knew of the Folly, possible); she could be unaware of my magical education but hopeful that I might have one because it would be bloody useful right then if I did; or she could know everything and merely be checking that I wasn’t liable to make her life very difficult by having a stroke as soon as I cast so much as a werelight.

She looked at me expectantly and eventually I held up my wrist. She swore again. I was looking forward to introducing her to Thomas: though in most areas he is a surprisingly modern and liberal man (especially given that he was born in 1900), he still hasn’t quite reached the point where hearing a woman swear doesn’t make his ears go pink while he clears his throat compulsively.

Taking a deep breath, she nodded  to herself. “Right… I can’t do anything about that without the proper tools. Stick close to me.” I didn’t argue, having no intention of running headlong, still queasy- not to mention _unarmed_ \- into a crater-pocked dystopian landscape. Though doing as I was told led me closer to the explosions than my sense of self-preservation suggested we should go.

I felt the _forma_ of the shield Victoria cast around us and could tell that it was strong, though nothing seemed immediately different and I didn’t hear her say a word. We kept to the perimeter of the warehouse, now, sticking to the shadows and heading in the direction of a side street parallel to the one we had tried to get through earlier, only without the embellishment of crumbled monstrosity.

I tried to look straight forwards and concentrate on our mission, the mission that would lead to Thomas, who I could then take as far away as possible, by force or blackmail if necessary. Unfortunately, I stumbled, and in stumbling I turned, and in turning I saw the fireball heading straight for Inspector Lewis.

“Watch out!” I shouted, my voice muffled by the shield but still audible enough to make Lewis duck. Unfortunately, it also meant that we were now conspicuous and that I was the unfortunate recipient of the wrath a woman capable of blasting solid concrete walls into submission.

Woodville-Gentle turned to me and I saw his irritation. He didn’t quite hiss “ _you?!_ ” in the way I’d often seen fictional villains do when outraged that the hero had foiled their plans, but then he wasn’t fictional, I wasn’t a hero, and though he definitely did seem outraged I really hadn’t done much to help our case.

I saw that Inspector Lewis was rumpled, exhausted and blood stained and that the assorted Folly suits surrounding him looked to be in an even worse state. That none of them were dead I attested less to their skill and more to Woodville-Gentle’s catlike tendency to play with his food.

He raised his hand in a silent gesture that I recognised far too well from my target practises with Thomas, and I attempted to dredge up every ounce of power from the obligation I really hoped he _had_ incurred when he force fed me tainted tea. “STOP!” I yelled, deciding that I’d worry about any possible damage to my vocal chords later.

Woodville-Gentle froze, his expression one of startled horror which I was still drugged enough to find comical. The effect wouldn’t last long, but it didn’t need to. Clutching his baton staff tightly, Lewis created a complex _forma_ \- fifth order at least, with a base of  _custodio_ \- and, before he could twitch, Woodville-Gentle was imprisoned in a sphere of light.

I only learned later that Sutton- who had been mid-melee with a group of suits- had used the distraction to make a hasty retreat. I had my own distractions to deal with at the time, too busy slumping unconscious against the breasts and or muscles I had so admired earlier to notice.


	28. Chapter 28

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Though the writing is coming along nicely, the posting will be a bit more infrequent for the next couple of hectic weeks. I'm aiming to leave no more than two days between chapters but thank you for bearing with me so far!
> 
> Edited in haste so if you see any mistakes, do let me know. I'm planning on doing a massive edit when the whole thing's complete, but thanks for your patience with my stupid errors. 
> 
> And now, on with the story...

Things I have learnt from the Cambridge Latin Course book that me, Lesley and Sahra are studying in our free time (at first because we thought they might be a laugh and then because we got strangely competitive about learning vocab): coquus is a funny word, especially when you’re pissed; Cerberus, spending most of his time _in culino_ , is a dog after Toby’s own heart; woman of the house Matella and Grumio, her alcoholic chef slave, have a thing for each other, maybe- another thing we decided when pissed; and Matella’s son, Quintus, is bit of a bad luck charm.

Quintus also reminds me quite a lot of Thomas.

He, like Thomas, seems to have been present for a very great number of pivotal world events. He, like Thomas, is a basically decent person who nevertheless has to put up with quite a lot of shit that really isn’t his fault- like his parents and town falling victim to a lot of unexpected explosive force. And he, like Thomas, appears to be at the centre of a seriously complex web of circumstances and people that he really wouldn’t have chosen to get involved with.

And so, as I woke, my first thoughts were something along the lines of: _Thomas in via est_. _Thomas in via ambulabat._ Except, even before I had chance to properly reorient myself , I realised that he really shouldn’t have been ambulabating anywhere. Dr Walid was urging him, in very persuasive terms, to sit the hell down (only refraining from forcing his hand because, as I soon realised, he was sticking a needle into my arm at the time). Mellenby and Lewis were hovering around him, as if resigned to at least catch him should the need arise.

When he saw that my eyes were open, however, he stopped in his tracks. The look of guilt and horror on his face made me want to go to him at once- in fact, my attempt to follow up on that desire was what made me realise about the needle. Walid tutted and told me to keep still. His voice was so strained that I didn’t dare disobey him, too. “I’m alright,” I reassured Thomas instead, and I really did feel a lot better than I had.

“You could have been killed,” he said, his voice quiet. I grimaced; he sounded even worse than he looked.

“But I wasn't,” I announced with perhaps a little too much enthusiasm. I heard Dr Walid scoff slightly beside me, clearly not appreciating my glass half full approach to the situation.

I tried to sit up a little more, and this time Walid helped me, his hand at my back. “Easy,” he warned, and I didn’t need telling twice. Fortunately, I didn’t fall straight back down again. I looked around and more of what had happened came back to me.

“Did we win?” I was now in the car park and no longer within sight of the warehouse. Woodville-Gentle was nowhere to be seen. To my right, I saw Sahra and Lesley, both talking on their fancy police radios. There were various Folly people milling around, but not as many as I had seen earlier so I reckoned most were back by the warehouse, Victoria Exploding-Doors among them.

Inspector Lewis stepped forward to answer while Mellenby tried to convince Thomas to sit down. Lewis looked less bloody that he had when I’d last seen him, but I noticed a line of bandaging under his shirt. “Sutton ran away,” he said with obvious distaste, “but we got Woodville-Gentle. Or at least he’s not going anywhere anytime soon.”

Mellenby, having finally convinced Thomas to perch on a nearby bollard, came over to us looking grim. “This isn’t over yet. We can’t keep him trapped forever.”

Some more of the details of my day drifted back into my mind and I nodded a greeting to Mellenby, “David.”

He frowned and looked to Dr Walid, as if taking my sudden use of his first name as an evidence of possible brain damage rather than a sign that I had finally seen the error of my stupidly jealous ways. Given how long it had taken me to reach this point, I couldn’t say that I blamed him.

I scrambled to my feet, attempted to pat him on the shoulder, missed, and ended up being caught by him, my face pressed against his shoulder. His grip was surprisingly strong for a man who’d been dead since 1972.

“‘m sorry,” I slurred into his jacket. I reckoned it was going to take some time for the drugs to properly leave my system, and at that point I’d probably be pretty damned embarrassed, but for now I just kept mumbling at David Mellenby’s lapel. “You’re a good man- not a bit like Charles Kingsley. Sorry I’ve been a dick.”

If he had any trouble parsing my sentences, he was polite enough not to let on. Instead, he rested a broad hand at the back of my neck- it was warmer than I’d remembered it. “Apology accepted, though unnecessary, I assure you. I would have been much more of a… ‘dick’, as you put it… at your age, and with much less provocation.”

When he had been my age, the world had just suffered war, economic depression and was on the brink of another war. He was a member of an organisation full of idiots who didn’t take him seriously and in a relationship that was unfairly illegal. I’d say that was provocation enough and, in fact, having even less of a brain to mouth filter than was usual, I _did_ say that it was provocation enough.

Mellenby- _David_ \- looked amused. He still had his arm around me. “Perhaps,” he replied, then I heard Thomas take a sharp breath as though attempting to stifle a sudden shock of pain. Evidently, so did Mellenby, as he spun around sharply, taking me with him, and I found myself struggling to remain upright until a hand caught hold of my jacket and steadied me.

Dr Walid was at Thomas’s side, asking him urgently what was wrong, his medical bag poised in readiness. I noticed that he was covered in blood- not his own, I hoped, that was definitely more than his job’s worth- and looking more like a field doctor than a gastroenterologist with a scientific interest in the uncanny. His face was grim and he seemed to have aged since-- how long ago had it been, since I called him on the way from Thomas’s storage unit? Surely it must have been longer than a day.

Before he could reply, there was the sound of an explosion followed by a concussion that knocked us off our feet. “What in hell…?” Inspector Lewis began as he heaved himself to his feet. I was still off mine when Victoria Exploding-Doors stumbled over, wide eyed and pale.

“He’s out, sir. I don’t know how… it shouldn’t be possible… the power he must have needed to… no human wizard could have... not without…”

I looked to David, still beside me on the ground, to Thomas, looking much as he did when he’d tried to use magic, and back to David again. “No human wizard,” I croaked.


	29. Chapter 29

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which the author attempts to evade actually writing any action scenes and instead has fun with Merlin (sorry, Myrddin). One day there will be action, but it is not this day.
> 
> Comments, as always, much appreciated.

Merlin- or Myrddin, as Thomas insists I call him, because “ _that was his_ name _, Peter_ ,” and it was how he was known until some French bloke pointed out that, real though it may have been, his name was shit- was considered to be a mad old coot in his day. Thomas is almost unnaturally patient about most things, but he has a zero tolerance policy to Merlin-bashing, and after a bit of research, I think I can see why.

Merlin- sorry, _Myrddin_ Wlytt- was a poet turned political advisor (I don’t know who to, exactly, but I know it definitely _wasn’t_ King Arthur because when I suggested to Thomas that it might have been, he gave me the same look he did when I asked him if _aqua_ could make goblins multiply). Whoever it was he was advising, they were “impervious to his good sense,” as Thomas puts it, and so, when he told them that a certain battle somewhere in Wales was a _really_ bad idea, they promptly ignored him, went there anyway, and everyone died.

Thomas got a really strange look on his face when he told me about that, and I remembered that that was very nearly what had happened in a place called Ettersberg. Thomas had ‘gathered information’- I guessed by being a badass spy, but he never confirmed this- about what had been going on there, but after his report (in which he’d stated, in no uncertain terms, that no one should attempt to extract any research material from Ettersberg), his Folly overlords decided that it would be be a jolly good idea to order an attempt to extract the research material from Ettersberg.

Fortunately, they were saved from what Thomas is certain would have been a massacre by the weather, thick snow and ice making travel by foot so impossible that the RAF, bless their trigger happy souls, said ‘sod this’ and bombed the place. Myrddin, not having been fortunate enough to have had the benefit of extreme weather and flying bombs, became a bit of a loner (mostly by virtue of the fact all his friends were dead) and retreated into the woods. There, he discovered two interesting things: firstly, that he didn’t appear to be getting any older; and secondly, that he could do magic.

Now, given that the former was hardly ideal for him (because of the dead friends thing), he spent a lot of time trying to put an end to interesting point number one with the aid of interesting point number two. It didn’t work. Instead he just seemed to get more powerful.

Then he decided that if he couldn’t kill himself, he’d just have to annoy people enough that they finished the job for him. Somehow, he managed to piss off some shepherds- not a group generally known for their tendency towards violent rages- to such an extent that they beat him with clubs, chucked him in a river and, in doing so, impaled him on a conveniently placed stake.

Seeing this, as well he might, as proof that the universe was giving him the finger, he decided to flip one right back at it and have a bit of a go at being the Antichrist until his conscience- the thing that had told him all along that his friends really shouldn’t fight their ill-fated battle for power- drove him to throw himself into an eternal pit.

Some of this information could be found on Wikipedia, or warped into countless Arthurian legends, but the truth remained the property of the Folly and all those who sailed in her, a dreadful warning to all those practitioners who toyed with the notion that immortality and omnipotence were goals to be aimed for rather than curses to be avoided at all costs. Or at least, that was the aim.

However, to paraphrase a quote Mrs Bellamy insisted I learn for my English GCSE: “some are born powerful, some achieve power, and some have power thrust upon them.” I’d never been in a position to ruminate on such matters too deeply until I found myself huddled behind a Mark II Jag with a naturally potent wizard whose magic had been drained by a devious madman who was, in turn, currently facing off against his former master, a man who’d wanted no part in any of this.

And, at the risk of over-stretching a metaphor (something that I know irritates Thomas), we all know that line about power corrupting, and absolute power corrupting absolutely. Myrddin certainly knew it, a thousand years before Baron Acton wrote it, and now I was to be given a practical demonstration, whether I wanted one or not.


	30. Chapter 30

While I was still making parallels between our situation and a certain scene in The Return of the King (namely the confrontation between the Lord of the ‘no man can kill me’ hubris and Eowyn ‘I am no man’ of Rohan), David Mellenby rose, headed for Thomas, kissed him soundly and resolutely ignored his protests as he pulled back to straighten out his suit. Renowned- and frequently mocked- in his lifetime for being a man of ideas rather than action, I have to say that I thought he was more than making up for it in his death.

He looked over in my direction and I scrambled to my feet. “Peter,” he said gruffly, nodding to me.

“David,” I replied, holding out my hand. He took it, gripped it firmly, and then let go.

“You know what I have to do?” he asked, adjusting his cufflinks.

I shook my head, “not really, no. I mean, I’m guessing that because you’re both dead, none of the normal rules of hyperthaumaturgrical degradation-” I saw David’s blank look and supplied “that’s what Dr Walid calls the process that makes your brain shrivel when you use too much magic. Anyway, none of that applies to you because- you know. Beyond that, I don’t...”

There was another explosion. Smaller than the last, but still enough to make the ground shake. “Gentlemen,” said Inspector Lewis urgently, “as fascinating as this is…”

David got the idea, “take care of Thomas. Just… take care.” With that, he headed towards the rising smoke. I still didn’t know what his plan was. I didn’t think he did, either.

Inspector Lewis turned to Sahra and Lesley who were awaiting instruction. “Stay here. Keep an eye out for Sutton and keep this area secure.”

Lesley looked set to protest but Sahra beat her to it, “what if you need our help?”

Lewis’s lips twitched, “I’ll give you a yell.” Then he ran turned on his heel and ran to catch up with David, Victoria Exploding-Doors following in his wake.  

Suddenly, our little huddle was far too quiet. Thomas was trying to get to his feet, failing, and being reprimanded by Dr Walid, but even his sternness was more muted than usual. It felt like we were all at the eye of a storm, and that was never a comfortable place to be. It seemed to have sobered me up, though, which was small mercy at the time- I think I’d have rather been stoned.

I could tell that Lesley and Sahra were less than happy about being ordered to stay put while their boss headed into the firing line. I, however, was more than content to sit this one out, which was what I intended on doing when I flopped down next to Thomas and wrapped an arm around him, trying to provide warmth and comfort, both of which he needed but would never have asked for.

Unfortunately, _I_ was the one wearing the magical (and magically modified) restraining device that was linked to the man currently making the earth move in a very literal sense.

The first thing I became aware of was that the metal had started to warm up. To begin with, it wasn’t uncomfortably hot, but soon it began to burn- though I noticed that moving my arm to the left cooled it, slightly (a conclusion I came to through the scientific process of flapping my wrist about wildly in an attempt to loosen the cuff).

Thomas caught hold of my arm and held it gently, examining the device carefully. His eyes were sharper, suddenly, his gaze focused where it had previously been glazed with pain and the drugs Dr Walid had been giving him to control it. As little as I liked my current situation, I was glad to see him look more like himself.

He took a sharp breath between his teeth and I guessed that the prognosis was not good. Dr Walid took a good look, too, and suggested the liberal application of vaseline to slide the cuff off. He tried it- it tightened, rather than loosening.

I asked whether amputation was an option (and found I was only half joking), but Thomas shook his head grimly. It seemed that that had been tried before, at least once to Thomas’s knowledge- and hadn’t gone well for the unfortunate armless sod.

The burning was soon accompanied by jolts of electricity which had me hopping to my feet and moving sideways before I really had time to notice what was happening. A pained look crossed Thomas’s face before the shutters came down and he hefted himself to his feet- with the help of his staff, I noticed, though I hadn’t registered its presence before then. I was suddenly suspicious of the role it might have played in the the apparent improvement of Thomas’s condition; with one look at Dr Walid’s wary expression as he eyed the silver-topped cane, I had my answer.

Sahra and Lesley gathered around. Their orders had been to guard us. If we were going to be forced to move towards the action, then it was going to be a group exodus. I was nowhere near as excited about this prospect as they seemed to be- but then, they weren’t the ones wearing the torture bracelet.

“Abdul,” Nightingale instructed, his voice reassuringly steady, “would you be so kind as to fetch the portrait of Woodville-Gentle.” Dr Walid nodded mutely, apparently having finally given up his attempts to save Thomas from himself, and removed the painting from a case I also hadn’t noticed- further proof of how out of it I had been. It was still covered in bubble wrap as it had been, with the addition of mud, presumably from David’s attempts to bury it.

I was beginning to realise the implications and started to protest, albeit with one arm held out to the side like I was just about to burst into a rendition of ‘I’m a little teapot,’ which might not have done much for my credibility. “Thomas, you can’t…” I’d had time to ponder the painting situation, and though I hadn’t had the opportunity to discuss my conclusions with anyone (what with being abducted by lunatics and all), I presumed that they had come to similar conclusions.

Destroying the painting of Woodville-Gentle would likely destroy, or at least weaken, his ghost. However, given magical link between the painting and Thomas, the knowledge that David Mellenby was also somehow involved in this process, and the obvious fact that Woodville-Gentle was a complete lunatic with a certain lust for revenge, it was safe to assume that the painting was somehow booby trapped and that destroying it “would not be without risks,” to use a typically Thomasian understatement.

Thomas stood to his full height and, even though he had to use his staff to do so, he looked like _the Nightingale_ once more. “He intends to hold you as a hostage. We have one of our own. I’ll wager that he won’t risk harm to it, but if he attempts to cause you injury, I will destroy it- you have my word.”

I was hopping about a bit, by now, the combination of burns and shocks bringing tears to my eyes. I wouldn’t be able to hold out for much longer, and I certainly didn’t want to go. I don’t have a death wish, not by a long shot. I’m an _architect_ , the biggest danger I’m supposed to face is asbestos. Even so, I didn’t _want_ Thomas’s word that he would be willing to sacrifice himself for me. “But what if…” he cupped my cheek in a cold hand, and kissed me softly.

“Let me worry about what ifs. Go, we’ll be right behind you. I won’t let _you_ down, Peter.” There was an emphasis there that I didn’t like one bit. One that I knew meant he felt he’d let someone else down. That he’d let David Mellenby down. I wanted to explain that he hadn’t. To tell him how I knew. But by then I was moving, being hauled by the arm to a fate I hadn’t asked for and hating myself for dragging the people I love along with me.


	31. Chapter 31

David Mellenby had never wanted to join the army. A pacifist by inclination, he’d nevertheless discovered that as little as he liked the prospect of war, he liked goose stepping racists even less. And so, he fought.

Thomas has never been one to romanticise. The figure he had described to me when talking about David was far from a lover’s romantic idyll: overly idealistic, frequently belligerent, virtually un-housetrained- all descriptions that I had heard Thomas use with some regularity. He never glorified his dead partner, instead grumbling about his many failings with a glint in his eyes and a tone to his voice which made me realise a lot about the nature of relationships. True love, I recognised, was just as much about acknowledging the other person’s flaws as it was about admiring their virtues.

Given Thomas’s realistic approach to his former lover’s attributes, it had come as quite a surprise when he announced to me one day that David had been “the finest soldier” he’d ever known. I hadn’t said anything to contradict him, but from all the accounts I’d read in my- quite embarrassingly extensive- research into David’s life, I’d gathered that he’d been considered by the military high-ups to be a bit of a waste of space. For Thomas’s sake, I decided to give Lieutenant Mellenby the benefit of the doubt; after all, it wasn’t as if I was going to be given a demonstration, either way.

Or so I’d thought.

When I arrived- arm first- to the now-familiar crater filled broad loading bay outside the warehouse, Woodville Gentle was standing at its centre- great for dramatic impact, terrible for tactics. The bracelet that had brought me there stopped burning when I got within a metre of the man who controlled its power. I shifted away again, experimentally. A shock jolted up my arm. I jumped back to where I had been. It was worth a try, at least.

Spells were flying about from all sides, which really made no sense at all. I could feel Inspector Lewis’s _signare_ , and one that I recognised as belonging to David Mellenby (I’d only seen him cast a werelight, but the experience had certainly managed to leave an impression), but no others. Was there a way to divert a spell? Or to use magic for super-speed and / or quick changes in phone boxes? In any case, it really wasn’t possible to pinpoint exactly where they were coming from.

Woodville-Gentle was clearly as frustrated by this as I was confused. Magic is not something that mixes well with high emotion; it’s virtually impossible to cast a spell when you’re worked up about something (meaning that it’s bloody difficult to use it in a high tension situation, unless you have nerves of steel and a terminally stiff upper lip. Which is why Thomas is a master practitioner and I set fire to tablecloths). Even with all his power, Woodville-Gentle’s casting was shoddy, most of his spells falling short of their mark.

Inspector Lewis and David, on the other hand, were clearly doing whatever it was they were doing as a team. I tried to take note of the spells they were using, but there were just too many and most of them were ones I didn’t recognise anyway. None of them were aimed directly at Woodville-Gentle- it being futile to try and injure a ghost- but they were fired in close proximity to him, angles changing all the time. At first, I couldn’t see the point of this at all, but then I saw Victoria Exploding-Doors rushing through the smoke beside me to a figure crouched on the floor.

They were creating a diversion, giving the outmatched Folly wizards the opportunity to retreat. The ones who were still able to do so, that is. I might have been more concerned for their predicaments were it not for the fact I was now squarely in the firing line of-- well, pretty much everybody in the vicinity with the ability to use magic, really. I was what Thomas likes to call a _sedentem anatis_ (a sitting duck by any other name would still be as fucked).

I had entered from stage left, heading through the loading bay in the direction of the warehouse, working my way through the warren of huts and the empty industrial containers. It was a strangely appropriate location for a magical apocalypse, I thought vaguely. I was sure that George Orwell would have approved, though I couldn’t for the life of me have explained why. Still a bit hazy on that now, to be honest.

At first Woodville-Gentle had been facing away from me; he turned and I saw madness in his eyes. There’s no hyperbole, there- I mean, it’s not like his eyes were red and pointing in different directions or rolling around, nothing like that- but he really did look unhinged. He strode forward and grabbed my arm. It takes a lot for a magician to resort to physical violence, not when casting a spell is so much easier and involves one hundred percent less actual bodily contact with someone you presumably don’t like very much.

“Mellenby!” he yelled, his hand working its way around my throat in a way that I have to say I didn’t like one bit. “It’s time to stop hiding.” Of course Woodville-Gentle knew the _signare_ , David had been his master. “Forty years in the shadows? And I’d thought you’d chosen suicide as your coward’s way out. This just surpasses it all.” I was very tempted to stomp on Woodville-Gentle’s foot. I didn’t, but my restraint had less to do with a sense of self-preservation and more to do with the fact that I suspected dead men didn’t really care too much about their toes.

David didn’t appear, though the explosions stopped. “Come out, or the boy dies,” he tightened his grip around my throat. Abducted, insulted, drugged and choked half to death by a malevolent spirit- this really wasn’t my day. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw David Mellenby approaching with his hands raised and thought, through the haze of asphyxiation, that it was kind of him to show up.

Woodville-Gentle still didn’t loosen his grip, and I was really beginning to wish that someone would just zap him. Instead, I heard Thomas’s voice- clear as a bell despite the rush of blood in my ears. Beside me, David shifted his weight, so he was ready to catch me when my throat was my own once more. Clearly Woodville-Gentle had felt he had bigger fish to fry; not the most comforting thought when it was apparently my partner on the menu. I gulped in oxygen like there was no tomorrow (an unfortunate idiom given the situation, but accurate nevertheless). “Alright?” David whispered in my ear.

It hurt to nod, but I did so anyway. Things were a bit hazy for a while. I registered David, solid and warm against my back. I recognised that ‘solid’ and ‘warm’ were probably not adjectives that ought to have applied to a dead man. I worried about Thomas. I wondered how he had survived the bursts of magic from both David and Woodville-Gentle when even David’s werelight had been enough to make him faint before.

Coming to my senses a little more, the worry and wonder turned to full blown panic and I tried to maneuver myself so that I could see what was going on, but David pulled me back against him. “Stay down,” he whispered, “whatever happens, just don’t draw attention to yourself.” Sound enough advice, and I was hardly in a position to disobey. He lowered me to sit on the asphalt and stood in front of me.  

Turning my head with a grimace and managing to focus my eyes, I saw Thomas standing resolute and pale in the dusk light, his staff in his hand. “Let them go,” he ordered in a voice of hard command.

It seemed to me at that moment that he had arrived on the scene like my own personal avenging angel, but according to accounts I heard later he had walked- not floated in a haze of heavenly light- to stand half out of sight in the rubble of one of the many craters. He had then called to dear old Albert not just the once as I had heard it, but several times, somehow throwing his voice as David and Inspector Lewis had their spells to disguise his location (had I known that he had been using magic to do this, I would have been even more confused. Not to mention concerned).

Now he was staring Woodville-Gentle down in a way that made _me_ want to roll over and surrender, and that I imagine would have had the vast majority of criminals in England running for the hills of Wales- but clearly our deceased denizen of earthly evil was made of sterner stuff.

Woodville-Gentle scoffed, “or…?”

“Or,” Thomas retorted coolly, “the portrait I painted will be destroyed.”

For a moment, I saw Woodville-Gentle’s shoulders tense, but then he laughed. “Oh, good show. You discovered my ruse. Unfortunately, old man, you are too late. I have my physical form, I have your magic and I am immortal. Do as you wish to the painting, there is no one with the power to best me now.”

“Albert,” David’s voice was soft, his tone the reasonable murmur beloved of all those used to dealing with the shit life threw up at them, “think about what you’re doing. Of the consequences.”

Woodville-Gentle sneered at him, “and I suppose aging backwards for you and Nightingale was just a happy coincidence? If I am to be damned for seeking to recapture my youth, then what of the two of you? I have only drained the power from one who should have relinquished it decades ago by any natural law.” David didn’t answer either of his questions; it was just as well, really.

David moved closer to his former apprentice, arms raised in a universal gesture of ‘I brought my empty hands to a gunfight.’ “Albert, I beg you. Think about what you’ve done- about what you’re planning to do. Don’t make this any worse for yourself. Come away with us, now, and perhaps we could come to some arrangement.”

“An _arrangement_?” Woodville-Gentle’s voice was shrill with incredulity. “You never have lived in the real world, Mellenby. Mere words and customs have no power to restrain me now. And you always were a bore. Goodbye, _Master_.”

Several things happened after that point in such quick succession that my overwrought mind barely had time to catch up. As Woodville-Gentle’s _forma_ began to take a dreadful shape, David stepped back- an attempt at retreat, I guessed, though too late for that now. Thomas stepped forward, as I’d known he would. Of course he’d try to protect David, even now. But what would happen to him-- what _could_ happen to him-- when…

The spell struck David in the chest like lightning and he reached out wildly, his hand landing on Thomas’s staff which he gripped for support. The spell continued, its strength increasing. “No…” I croaked, but there was nothing I could do. It was hopeless, and though David clung to Thomas’s staff, it was clear to me then that he was losing his grip on life. Or on something that wasn’t quite life but looked one hell of a lot like it.

I was drugged, half-choked, exhausted and had consumed nothing but poisoned tea all day; things that seemed clear to me then were much like a thirsty man’s mirage. What I saw was David Mellenby, dead at Thomas’s feet. That David Mellenby was dead to begin with (as dead as a door-nail), appeared to have slipped my mind.

Certainly, Thomas was giving a convincing enough display of a man mourning for his lover. He was begging for David not to be dead (a tall order, by anyone’s standards) and begging with Woodville-Gentle to bring him back. Or to kill him as well. I started to scramble to my feet; that just wasn’t on.

Woodville-Gentle cast another lightning bolt.

The thing about lightning is, it’s very bright. Blindingly so. As such, I wouldn’t advise staring directly at it when it strikes. Given that I had been, much of what happened next I found out later, having had to spend several minutes blinking away spots of phantom light after the initial spell.

I know that Thomas, like David, had been gripping his staff when the spell had been cast, that he had collapsed after Woodville-Gentle had struck him, and that David Mellenby had taken the staff up instead, risen from the dead-- and set Albert Woodville-Gentle on fire.


	32. Chapter 32

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Fake science ahoy (I can only apologise)

In his pre-Darth Vader days, there’s no denying that Anakin Skywalker deserved a good smacking. Despite this, the otherwise rational enough Obi-Wan Kenobi loved the whiny little shit and didn’t much like the idea of killing him, even after he’d gone on a completely unnecessary child killing spree- which, like many things in the prequel films, made literally _no sense_ , but I digress.

Anyway, my point is, the relationship between a master and an apprentice is a complicated one- much like that between a parent and a child- and even if the apprentice turns out to be a mass-murdering psychopath, it’s got to be a tough call to have to cook them (immolation being a popular choice for dealing with such things, it seems).

Turning away so I didn’t have to see Woodville-Gentle dissolving, and trying to ignore his screams- of rage, I managed to convince myself, rather than pain- I wondered what it would take for Thomas to set me on fire. Quite a lot, I suspected. Actually, given how distraught David looked at that moment, I was thinking that nothing short of nuclear warfare would make him so much as singe my arm hairs.

I struggled to my feet and staggered over to where David stood and Thomas was lying, Inspector Lewis bent over him. “Is he…?” I couldn’t bring myself to finish the question. I had seen what Woodville-Gentle had done to him, and had been surprised enough to see him upright before that point. I hardly dared to breathe, feeling like my world was about to come crashing down around my ears like so much building rubble. Surely, with all that had happened, there was no hope that even Thomas could have--

“He’s alive,” Inspector Lewis announced and I sucked in a breath so sharp that I almost fell over. I’d been preparing myself for the worst- resigned to it, even- and the relief was so profound that I seemed to forget how to function as a human being. From the state of my face, afterwards, the process involved a lot of moisture, though I couldn’t have explained how or when it had come to be there.

In the time it took my brain to reboot, Lewis had managed to drag David’s attention away from the pyrotechnic display (if you ever wanted to know what would happen when you set the physical manifestation of a ghost stored in a painting and fed on magic alight, just think about the sky over Westminster at around 12:02am on New Year’s Day for the optimum combination of light and smoke).

“It worked,” David was saying, his voice shaking, “I hardly dared believe it, but… it worked.” I couldn’t even begin to imagine what ‘it’ might have been, but I gathered that they’d been busy while I’d been taking tea with the outlaws. “Get Dr Walid.” Lewis nodded and ran off. I had to admire the man’s energy; I hadn’t done any magic at all and I wanted to sleep for a week. David looked up at me, “alright there, Peter?”

I was fairly sure that I wasn’t, but I nodded anyway. “What…? How…?”

Fortunately, this seemed to be about the level of coherence that David had been expected, and he was ready for it. He took Thomas’s staff in his hand. “It’s difficult to explain, and this isn’t really the time…” he looked over his shoulder and hesitated for a moment, still looking agonised by what he saw, “or the place for a full explanation. But before we came, I charged Thomas’s staff- with his own magic, strictly speaking. I had hoped that he wouldn’t have to draw on it at all, but…” he spread his hands, “it acted as a… a magic conductor, if you like,” _he_ clearly didn’t like, given his pinched expression, but I nodded to let him know that I understood- vaguely- inadequate though he felt the comparison had been.

“So, it grounded Woodville-Gentle’s spells?” I tried, supposing that that explained why Thomas hadn’t been fried. He’d been holding the staff at the time he was attacked, I remembered, and so had David been, but I’d never heard of a staff being used like that before.

David looked around as if checking whether anyone was in earshot. Nearer to the warehouse, wounded Folly members were in various stages of licking their wounds, Victoria Exploding-Doors coordinating the cleanup. Inspector Lewis still hadn’t returned with Dr Walid and Woodville-Gentle was-- not going to be bothering us anymore. “I died with one of Thomas’s old wartime staves in my hand- can you imagine why that might have been?”

I looked down at Thomas and must have decided he looked lonely down there because flopped down inelegantly beside him, took hold of his hand and looked back up at David. “You used it to… you know.”

He did know. He nodded. “Sometimes I would use staves for experiments, and it wasn’t uncommon for me to use one of his rather than one of my own- I didn’t think he would take it to mean that I’d had anything other than a magical accident but… No matter. The fact is, I would not have been able to perform the act with a staff charged with my own magic. It is not possible for a wizard to use their own magic against themselves.”

I snorted, “tell that to my hand when I made my first werelight,” I still had a small patch of scarring on my hand from the burn, “tell that to those poor sods whose brains are in Dr Walid’s jars.” Talk of Dr Walid made me look around for him. I wondered, vaguely, what was taking him so long.

David nodded, “if a practitioner casts a spell that is too complex or unlearned or if they draw on too much magic at once, yes, accidental damage can occur. But one cannot purposefully turn one’s own magic on oneself.”

“Like magnetic repulsion?” I guessed.

David shook his head, looking thoughtful. “No, not like that…” it seemed he couldn’t resist giving a full explanation, after all, time and place be damned. I knew that until Walid and Lewis appeared, David wouldn’t be able to restrain himself from giving me a science lecture, albeit one watered down for the sake of an architect and with liberal use of the eternal wizarding get out of jail free explanation card, ‘because magic.’

It seemed that ‘magnetic attraction’ was a more accurate description- though, again, not accurate enough to make David look like he hadn’t just sucked several lemons when he used it. Like iron filings being attracted to a magnet, so magic wishes to return to its source (like diffusion in reverse, I suggested, backing away slightly at David’s outraged expression) and has no desire- not that magic has sentience, David was quick to add- to use up its source. I think the word ‘catalyst’ might have been thrown about, but I can’t remember who by.

Exhausted, still suffering from a drug hangover and with my blistered and swollen wrist reminding me of its indignation in no uncertain terms, I didn’t take all that much in. The general gist, as far as I could tell, was this: Woodville-Gentle and David had both been leaching Thomas’s magic to such an extent where there wasn’t enough magic to draw on himself (hence his inability to cast effective spells).

When David had come along, and later the paintings, Thomas’s magic had tried to draw on the apparent external stores as it would a staff- or as an apprentice would a master (that, I learned, was why apprentices share so much of their master’s _signare_ before they become fully trained, so that they can draw on the resources of their masters in times of need). However, due to the ‘unusual’ nature of the circumstances and the fact that Thomas’s internal magic had been so greatly depleted by this point, the effect was much like that of trying to feed a malnourished person a three course meal in less than half an hour (ie. ‘a bit not good’).

Since charging the staff that morning, Thomas had been able to gradually (under threat of swift medical vengeance by Dr Walid) been able to restore some of his magic. By holding onto Thomas’s staff when Woodville-Gentle had cast against him, David had hoped to be able to channel the magic into the staff, thereby draining some of his potency. And so, he had. The same had happened when Woodville-Gentle had attacked Thomas; the magic- his own, had been attracted back to its source- and the staff had acted as grounding to make sure he didn’t OD on his own power (which would have worked better had Thomas not been physically weakened, but at least it worked enough to keep him breathing).

With a supercharged staff in hand, no possibility of cauliflower brain syndrome, and the full knowledge that Thomas’s magic considered Woodville-Gentle’s body to be a foreign body, he cast against him and started to fight the infection, reducing the man shaped contagion to a pile of smouldering ash. Or at least that’s what he had become. It was a relief that he’d finally finished screaming.

Head aching from the sheer volume of only vaguely on point science analogies it had had to assimilate, I didn’t notice Lesley and Sahra approaching until they were right by our side, panting.

“Come quickly,” Lesley began before having to lean over with her hands on her knees to catch her breath.

“Back by the car,” Sahra continued for her, gasping herself. “Dr Walid was patching people up, but Sutton came, and…”

“Stay with Thomas,” David ordered, running back to the in the direction of the car park with Lesley while Sahra headed over to get reinforcements from the among the stragglers and the clean up parties around the warehouse.

I one hand on Thomas’s cheek as he began to stir, the other clutching the staff that David had put into it before leaving. It was useless to me with the magical restraint preventing me from using magic (I tried to cast another werelight and failed, miserably), but the sense of Thomas’s magic running through the length of the cane was comforting, at least. And if push came to shove, I supposed I could smack Sutton with it.

I did wonder, vaguely, how the cuff was still active with Woodville-Gentle dead, but there seemed to be more pressing matters to worry about just then. Like the fact Thomas had opened his eyes.


	33. Chapter 33

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Easter, if that's your bag, and happy 27th March if it isn't.

Thomas is the most stubborn man I know when it comes to his health, and from what David had told me when we had our storage unit ‘let’s think about anything but these creepy paintings’ chat, ‘twas ever thus. He’s been shot- twice- once in the war and once on duty as a police Inspector. Both times, his stubbornness had almost killed him (though it had probably also saved his life). In the first instance, his refusal to seek help before every one of his men had been seen to had led to the wound getting badly infected; in the second, he insisted on returning to work far sooner than was medically advised. Instead of resting in a nice, safe hospital bed, he went traipsing around London, setting of demon traps with a still only partially healed bullet hole in his lung.

David had despaired, but all he could realistically do when faced with the irrepressible force that is a Thomas on a mission was to be there for him when he came home. And so he had been- until his death, of course. Thomas had been in his seventies at the time, so David had probably thought it safe to assume that he wouldn’t be getting himself into too many scrapes in his dotage. But now Thomas Nightingale, one of the oldest men alive, was attempting to stride right on back into God knows what.

I’d tried to reason with him, and at first he’d been too weak not to listen, but galvanised by a combination of the staff’s reserves and the more potent power of people he cared for being in imminent danger, he quickly came around to ignoring my objections. Still, I gave it my best shot. “Dr Walid will kill me,” I protested as I trot-stumbled after him, my feet having apparently been replaced by lead weights at some point in the not too distant past.

Thomas stopped so suddenly that I almost ran into him, “Dr Walid might already have been rendered incapable of killing anybody.”

Muddled though my brain was, I understood his meaning well enough. Swallowing hard, I nodded once and made to follow him.

“Peter,” he put a hand on my chest, “you could stay here. Should stay here.” He paused, “I’d rather you stayed here.”

I raised my eyebrows (both of them; I hadn’t had training in the art of sardonic single eyebrow raising. I got the impression it was only taught in posh public schools). Still, I hope it conveyed the message ‘not bloody likely’ strongly enough.

Thomas opened his mouth as if to protest again, his hand still on my chest. Instead, he bent forward so that our foreheads touched before turning on his heel, parade style, and marched off. _Once more unto the breach_ , I thought, before taking a deep breath and following him.

______________________________

One of our lesser known philosophers, Richard ‘Lord’ Grant- or 'dad', to me- once said, “who knows why the fuck anything happens?” Chaos theory in a nutshell. The real beauty of his statement is its ability to linger in my mind in situations where all other  thoughts have failed me, such as when walking into small scale magical war zone.  

This time, there were several men (and women) down, and they didn’t look like they were just taking a bit of a breather. I tried not to look too closely or think about it too hard. As I mentioned, this was one of those times when I was hard pressed to think at all beyond _blood_ , _magic_ , _Thomas_ , _take cover_.

Sutton and David had squared up, eying each other up in what was clearly a brief lull before further terrifyingly deadly shit, and it was only a matter of time before Sutton saw Thomas- or me- and decided to take a potshot. I was glad- later, when I’d regained at least some of my cognitive abilities- that Sutton and Woodville-Gentle had taken the precaution of casting wards to keep people away, so at least there were no civilian casualties (or at least none who didn’t arrive there knowing that they might leave in a box).

At the time, however, it was ‘an inconvenience,’ to put it mildly, that the only car present in the car park was Thomas’s Jag, the Folly personnel clearly having arrived from another direction or by other means. Broomstick, possibly. Otherwise, there was very little cover to speak of other than the occasional half-hearted attempt at topiary. I ducked down behind the Jag, for all the good it would do, and tugged Thomas down with me before he could get his head blown off.

Sahra and Inspector Lewis were flanking David, a fact I’d failed to notice at first with my tunnel vision focusing on the threat. Lewis looked to be in a bad way, but I couldn’t think too much about that, then. I definitely couldn’t think about his husband and kids. About Sahra’s parents and what they would say if anything happened to her. About the fact Sutton might be the least of my troubles if they knew it’s somehow been involved... There would be time for that later. _Focus, Peter_.

Present company excepted, all those who were physically able to get the hell out of there as fast as possible appeared to have done so. This was good for us, since even with just me and Thomas behind the car, it was getting a little crowded. I guessed that the Jag might be somehow magic-proofed, but I couldn’t be sure. Given the wards on Thomas’s flat, I thought it was a fairly safe bet that there would be at least some protective spells on his car. Whether they would withstand attack and keep us safe in turn remained to be seen (spells or no spells, Sutton and co had still managed to mess with Thomas’s heating, after all). I found myself patting a the sleek, silver wheel arch, as if the encouragement might make the car more willing to save my bacon.

Thomas was looking around, assessing our situation in a way that really brought home the fact that he had been an officer, and a good one. It might have been a bit of a turn on were this not one of the least sexy settings I could think of. Battles might have an element of romance about them- at least in the re-telling- but industrial park car parks? Not bloody likely.

I heard Thomas take a sharp breath and turned to see what he was looking at. Crouched beside the very inadequate cover of a balding hedge was Dr Walid. He’d very purposefully placed himself between two casualties and ‘the action’ and, though not all of the blood on his shirt seemed to have come from others, he didn’t seem willing to move any time soon.

His attention caught by a movement from Thomas, Walid turned to look at us. At first his eyes widened, but then his expression set, chin jutting defiantly. No, he wasn’t going anywhere. Thomas motioned again, more emphatically. A gesture for the doctor to take cover with us. Walid motioned to the bodies behind him, but even my untrained eye could tell that they were just that. Bodies. There was nothing Walid or anyone could do for them now.

With a small sigh, Thomas broke cover to lunge at Walid, grab him bodily by the lapels and heft him back towards the jag, just in time for the spells to start flying again. Once again, David’s tactics were mostly defensive and he, Lewis and Sahra were keeping the majority of the danger from our doors (or from our 1967 Mark II Jaguar, in this case), but the bush that Walid and his… charges… had been hidden behind caught fire soon after he had been parted from it.

Walid was trembling visibly. Red headed and pale enough to begin with, he looked ghostly now, and I should know. Thomas clutched his arm, “Abdul, where is your bag?” There was no response. Thomas asked again, his voice clipped, tone commanding enough to break through shock, “Abdul. Your bag.” Walid motioned jerkily to a bin just behind the now-burning foliage. Thomas checked that the coast was relatively clear, calculated that Sutton was too distracted to cast anything too drastic in his direction, and made another dash, returning with Walid’s medical case.

By this point, I had got my act together enough to start asking Walid where he was hurt. After being answered by a vacant stare, I decided to take matters into my own hands and was undoing Walid’s shirt when Thomas returned, trying to find the source of the bleeding. I am not a doctor- not even close. I didn’t even pass the first aid course I’d taken as part of my Duke of Edinburgh Award back when dinosaurs (and Labour Prime Ministers) had roamed the earth. This was why I was groping ineffectually at the poor man’s torso and clearly inflicting enough pain to be brought up on human rights charges.

Fortune sometimes favours the well-meaning-if-stupid, however, as it did in this case; my manhandling seemed to wake Dr Walid from his stupor. He grabbed my hand to prevent me from further assaults on his person and I gave him a sheepish look, “good to have you back, doctor.”

I backed off to let Thomas get through. He was much better at field medicine than I was and I really didn’t think I wanted to know how he’d become so practised. Sparks flew over the top of the Jag and the whole car vibrated. It hadn’t exploded, so I supposed I’d been right about the wards. I didn’t feel as comforted as I might have if I’d been actually inside the Jag, however-- and driving very quickly away.


	34. Chapter 34

More sparks flew and the lights went out. It wasn’t pitch black after that- there’s no such thing in London- but it was far darker than it needed to be for Thomas to apply a dressing a deep gash that ran across Dr Walid’s torso. If I hadn’t known that magic had caused it- somehow- I’d have thought someone had come at him with a knife. I couldn’t really see his face, now, but he’d gone quiet a few minutes before and I knew enough about this sort of thing to gather that that wasn’t a good sign. It’s the screaming ones who are fine, that sort of thing. Well, maybe not fine, exactly, but--

Thomas’s voice broke through my thoughts in that measured tone he uses in situations where other men might swear. “Would you be so kind as to cast a werelight?”

“Err…” I began dumbly. Thomas didn’t press but I could feel his impatience almost like  _vestigia_. “I can’t. The cuff.”

There was a long pause. Not being able to see Thomas’s expression, I had no way of knowing what he was thinking but by the light of a fireball that flew overhead, I thought I saw his eyes widen. But I could have been imagining it- the light only lasted for a second. Or, thinking about it, his eyes could have been widening _because_ of the fireball.

Though there was only a relatively small vintage car between us and the fighting, I felt strangely detached from it. This was in large part, I realised, due to the fact that it eerily silent. Spells used in battle are mostly non-verbal, cast by combining a physical action and a mental _forma_ , and unless they blow something up (or someone screams), there’s not much associated noise.

“Peter,” he was Captain Nightingale, again, and his voice sounded even more formidable set against all that unnatural quiet, “you need to get the portrait of Albert Woodville-Gentle out of the boot of the car. I shall cover you. You must do it on my command.”

I blinked. I hadn’t really thought much about the paintings, or what must have become of them after Thomas had proposed to use one as a bargaining chip. Presumably, they’d been put back in the boot at some point, though they hardly seemed important, now. “But Woodville-Gentle’s gone,” I protested. “What do we need it for?”

If anything, I thought it best that the picture stay out of sight. If he saw it, Sutton might try and get hold of it and try and resurrect his master for a second time and I for one was none too keen on that idea.

“He’s not gone enough,” Thomas announced grimly. “Your restraint is tied to him. If he were truly exorcised, you would be able to use magic.” He ducked slightly to the side to get a view of what was happening, “and David would have been more than a match for Mr Sutton alone.”

Along with the sense of horror I felt on hearing these declarations, several questions also occurred to me all at once. If Woodville-Gentle had been sapping Thomas’s magic, couldn’t Thomas somehow disable the bracelet? And if it was Thomas’s magic, why was Woodville-Gentle’s _signare_ not identical to his? “Is a _signare_ an impression left by a spell’s caster, then, rather than an imprint of their particular magic?”

Something exploded and rubble hailed down on us. I jumped forwards instinctively before Thomas pulled me back against the shelter of the car, bits of car park ricocheting off the Jag’s silver body. “ _Peter_!” Thomas’s sharp exasperation was probably warranted; I snapped back to attention.

“Right, boot, painting. Then what?”

“Then you will destroy it.”

I had more questions- I _always_ have more questions- but Thomas had said that he would gladly risk the possible consequences of destroying the painting for my sake, and now I knew it wasn’t just my arse on the line. I reached out to the grip the hand of the dark shape I knew to be Dr Walid. There was no response. “I’ll do it,” I told Thomas without further deviation.

I could just about make out the outline of Thomas moving into position. “On the count of three,” he instructed after tugging me into position against him. “Don’t look around, just get the portrait and retreat back to cover at once. Do you understand me, Peter?”

“Yes,” I said, “Sir”- that part I added unconsciously. He didn’t comment.

I wouldn’t consider myself to be an especially cowardly person, but I’m an architect, not a soldier or a policeman or a fire fighter. I’m the sort of bloke who would be doing our brave service personnel a favour by running away at the first sniff of danger rather than running towards it and giving them another body to worry about. And yet that’s what I was about to do.

Thomas’s “GO!” was so forceful that it seemed to propel me with a magic of its own. I could feel the shield he cast around me and the heat of the spells he was sending towards-- whatever-- but I obeyed him to the letter, concentrating on nothing but his instructions: _boot_ , _portrait_ , _don’t look_ , _retreat_.

I ducked back down the car and a few seconds later, Thomas rejoined me. Afterwards, there was a period where I genuinely thought that, protective car wards or no, we were toast. But then, after some clearly impressive manoeuvres which I half-wished I’d been able to watch, the fight was directed elsewhere. I felt David’s _signare_ , alive in the air like static electricity.

By the light of a werelight- not as bright as he could have made it, with the supply of magic he was drawing from the staff in his hand, but sensibly muted to conserve power while he could- Thomas examined the bandage on Dr Walid’s chest. He’d done a bloody neat job, particularly considering the fact he’d been working blind for most of the time.

Walid’s eyes opened and he blinked at Thomas. “Please tell me this is all a figment of my imagination,” he said hoarsely.

“No such luck, I’m afraid, Abdul.”

The doctor grunted. I couldn’t blame him.


	35. Chapter 35

Thomas rummaged in Dr Walid’s medical bag and extracted a syringe and a scalpel, his werelight hovering over the bag. My eyes widened at the scalpel. “Seriously? Do you just carry one about with you in case an interesting corpse crosses your path?”

Walid looked at me and shrugged one shoulder, “stranger things have happened.” His eyes flickered about the car park, or as much as he could see of it, eventually resting on the globe of light floating an inch from his arm. “ _Much_ stranger.” He had a point there.

“Abdul,” Walid’s attention snapped back to him, “I want to give you some morphine now. Peter, here,” he passed me the scalpel, “make it thorough but aim for the heart first.” I froze, sharp medical instrument in hand, because this really _was_ Dorian Gray and I was going to have to kill a man. Sort of. Perhaps. Probably. _Hopefully_.

I tried to swallow but my mouth suddenly felt very dry. My palms, on the other hand, were sweating enough that I nearly dropped the scalpel. I stared at it stupidly for a moment and suddenly had some inkling of what Macbeth must have felt- only his target was much more fleshy. And his weapon much less sanitary.

“Peter?” I recognised Thomas’s tone as the one my mum used to use on me and my cousins when something spooked us but we still had to do it. Like staying in bed with the light off after a nightmare, or going into Santa’s grotto (I was seven, department store elves are creepy, Santa’s beard fell off- let’s just move on). It was that same reasonable firmness, uncompromising but not unkind. “Destroy the painting now, please.”

Despite everything, nothing I had faced to that point had terrified me as much as the prospect of stabbing the painted figure of Woodville-Gentle did. What would happen? Would David be hurt, too, somehow? Would _Thomas_? I caught Walid’s eye- he looked more comfortable. Calmer. _That’ll be the morphine_ , I decided. I wondered if Thomas would give me some. Wondered how often he’d had to administer it before and who to. _To whom_.

My hand was shaking, but I didn’t realise until Thomas reached out to steady it. The fight was getting louder again, now. Nearer. We didn’t have long before we’d be right in the middle of it. “Peter, if I could do this in your place, I would. But if something were to… happen… as a result of the sabotage, I shall be more able to contain it at a distance.”

And besides, I realised with a sickening clarity, if he was linked to the painting to such an extent that in wrecking it he harmed himself, he might not be able to finish the job.

Thomas’s hand was still on mine and I patted him awkwardly with my free hand before pulling away, taking a deep breath and stabbing Woodville-Gentle in the heart.

If you’ve never felt a demon trap being disarmed, you’re lucky. The sensation is like being ducked headfirst into a frozen pond and knowing you’re never going to be warm again. Like witnessing a horrific car accident. Like losing everything you love. This was like that, only worse.

There was a scream, sharp and horrifying. I stabbed the painting again, just to make it shut up, but the scream only got louder. It was worse than when Woodville-Gentle had been burning. My whole body was shaking, now, and it was an effort to raise the scalpel for a third time but I knew I had to. This time, I sliced- a diagonal line from corner to corner.

The silence that followed was profound, stifling. I retched, but there was nothing left in my stomach to come up. For several moments I looked down at the ruined painting and concentrated on breathing. In. Out. In. Out. I didn’t dare look up, just incase…

“Alright, Peter?” Thomas sounded concerned but calm and, most of all, alive.

I looked up to see two worried sets of eyes looking back at me. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine,” I was surprised to find that this was the truth, the sensation that nothing could possibly be alright again fading like the remnants of a bad dream. “How about you?”

“Much the same as before,” Thomas informed me with a slight frown which I mirrored soon enough. If he felt the same then where had all that power gone?

And then I thought I knew. “How about…?” I trailed off, not really sure I wanted to know the answer, but motioned with my head to the other side of the car.

Thomas hesitated and that was strangely reassuring. He’d been so in control that it was almost unnatural, given all he’d been through. But I’d had a glimpse of Thomas in battle mode, and I think I understood then how he’d managed to walk several hundred miles through enemy territory, in the snow, while shot.

It had seemed unbelievable when David had told me, back in the storage unit when we’d been wrapping the paintings and trying to distract ourselves from what they might mean, but now I saw that Thomas had survived because people were counting on him. He got home because he _had_ to.

But the war was over, now, and he didn’t need to do this alone.

“Do you want me to…?” I asked, but he shook his head and moved swiftly. It was like tugging a tooth, I supposed. Best not to linger over the task.

He peered up over the top of the Jag’s boot. For a moment he froze, then I saw his eyes widen and his mouth actually fall slack. I slid away from Walid- who was by this point too spaced out to care- and peered over the front of the car to see for myself.

Gareth Sutton was on the floor, propping himself up awkwardly with his left arm, his right hand side almost entirely immobile. Even from some distance, it was clear even to my extremely untrained eye that he’d had some kind of stroke. He was attempting to back away from the figure in front of him, and I knew at a glance why.

David Mellenby was tracking his movements like a big cat waiting for an opportunity to pounce. In my experience of him so far, I had generally known him to wear his heart on his sleeve (or at least his feelings on his face), unless he’d been very careful to school his expression to neutrality. Now there was nothing, just a blank determination and an ‘aura’, for want of a better word, of power so strong that I almost felt obliged to avert my gaze, and, in fact, did.

Instead, I looked behind him, at Inspector Lewis, Sahra and Lesley. They were all frozen in place, clearly by a spell- and not one of Sutton’s. They each looked horrified, knowing what was about to happen. David was planning on killing an unarmed, defenceless man, and there was nothing they could do about it.


	36. Chapter 36

Ok, granted, he wasn’t a very _nice_ man. But that wasn’t the point. That point was that David _was_ \- or at least, he had been- and you can’t just go around killing people, no matter how annoying they’d been. Alright, so Sutton had been less annoying and more ‘murderous,’ but you get the idea.

Nightingale was frozen, too, but not by a spell. “Thomas?” I called to him uncertainly. He started visibly but then shook himself out of his stupor, giving me what I think he’d hoped was a reassuring smile but which was actually a grimace. I was just about to ask him what we should do when, staff in hand, he removed himself from the relative safety of the space behind the Jag and strode purposefully towards David.

I almost called after him but stopped myself. There wasn’t much point- I knew that stride; nothing short of a brick wall would have slowed him down and it would have taken much more than that to stop him entirely. I looked down to check on Walid. He’d dozed off. I was reassured to hear him snoring. Medically clueless I may have been, but I know that corpses don’t snore. Not in the general way of things, anyway. I removed my coat and flung it over him before heading after Thomas at a less-than-elegant jog.

David was still rounding on Sutton, shooting sparks at the ground around him, making him whimper and back off, scooting backwards in his forced half-sitting position with the help of his still functioning arm and leg.

When I got closer and could see his face I saw that he was enjoying it- taking pleasure in seeing Sutton squirm. He didn’t seem to register Thomas’s presence at all until Thomas had placed himself directly between the man on the floor and himself. David stopped short in the process of manipulating another _forma_ , “Thomas, get out of the way.” There was nothing of the kindly, pacifist scientist in his voice, now.

If I’d thought that Nightingale had been intimidating- and more than a little bit sexy- when he’d been in army mode earlier, now he was terrifying. Ice and fire and a whole lot more cliches besides. He was only slightly taller than David but now he seemed to tower. “Not like this.” He stood firm, though he rocked forward on the balls of his feet, ready to strike if necessary, his staff clasped firmly in his right hand.

David was regarding him with cool amusement tinged with what looked a lot like exasperation. “Always the good Samaritan, Thomas.”

I wouldn’t have previously thought Thomas capable of harming David if push came to shove, but push had come and I could see that Thomas was indeed more than ready to shove back if he had to.

I had a sudden flashback to a case Thomas had been working on about six months ago. I’d gone with him, along with Sahra, because I’d insisted, and so had she- though for different reasons. In the basement of a dingy Soho strip club, Sutton- and, before him, Woodville-Gentle- had carried out all manner of macabre experiments. Thomas hadn’t allowed either of us to see much of it, but we saw enough not to want to. Before he went out of sight, he’d given us grave instructions about what we must do if _something_ emerged, wearing his body. In short, we’d been told to kill on sight.

David’s _signare_ had appeared to be his own when he cast the spells at Sutton, and it bore little resemblance to that of Woodville-Gentle, but it must have, once upon a time, since David had been his master. Might he have managed to possess David and twist his _signare_ to fit? I certainly wouldn’t have put it past him. I suddenly felt very exposed and might have been tempted to retreat back behind the car had Thomas not been so obviously in danger (and had my legs been able to move).

Thomas cocked his head, eyes narrowing. Then he stepped forward to rest his hand on David’s- or possibly not!David’s- chest. I tensed, but David merely sighed. “Thomas, it’s me. Of course it’s me. But you know what he’s done… what his _master_ -” he spat the word as if it left a bad taste in his mouth “did. What he did to us… you only know the half of it. He doesn’t deserve your consideration. And I can do it, now. I can more than do it. Think what I could do with this power. The good I could do.”

 _With that power I should have power too great and terrible_. I was trying desperately not to think about The Lord of the Rings, but it was a tough call and David was a wizard, after all. All he needed was some more grey in his hair and a beard and he’d… I realised I’d lost track of what David was saying, but when I’d stopped being distracted I found I hadn’t missed much. He was still reeling off what he clearly thought was a fairly convincing list of all the many people he’d be able to help with his own particular brand of justice.

 _The way of the ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire for of strength to do good_. Remember Myrddin? I certainly did, then.

Thomas didn’t look ferocious anymore, merely exhausted. He shook his head, “David, this isn’t you. It’s the magic speaking. Killing Gareth Sutton would make you no better than he was, and Woodville-Gentle is gone, now. No better than the old guard at the Folly.” I thought I saw David flinch at that. “Just… come away with me.” He held out his arm in what I recognised to be a gesture of appeasement, trying to draw David to him.

Instead, David backed off, expression hardening. “Thomas, I’m afraid my mind is quite made up. You know I’ve always favoured Bentham.” Thomas winced and I tried to figure out what he might mean. I could hardly just come out and ask him. It wasn’t until later that I found out.

Jeremy Bentham, utilitarian philosopher and social reformer. Body now partially mummified and residing in UCL where he occasionally attends the odd meeting as a considerably more silent participant than he would have been when he was proclaiming that “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” I don’t know for sure, but I get the impression that this wasn’t the scenario he had in mind when he came up with that.

There was a whimper from behind Thomas. I’d almost forgotten that Sutton was there by now, for all that his defence was the purpose of us being there. In part, I could see where David was coming from; the poor sods Sutton had kidnapped hadn’t had anyone to defend _them_. But on the other hand, my mum, teachers and pretty much everyone I’d ever come across in a moral context had drilled home to me the fact that two wrongs don’t make a right, and Sutton wouldn’t be terrorising anyone else, not without killing himself in the process, if I was any judge (and I’d seen enough of Dr Walid’s brains to consider myself to be one).

David shook his head, sadly. “Thomas, the greater good.” Wasn’t that what Hitler had said he was acting for? I was so distracted by this thought (yes, I know, _again_ ) that I didn’t notice David moving until he had already shaped the _forma_. “Impello,” he said, his voice resounding. Thomas was thrown backwards, despite the shield he’d erected. His staff skittered across the tarmac and lay still, Thomas similarly motionless.

I tensed, fully expecting to be next, but David merely rounded on Sutton again, clearly not seeing me as a threat. In fact, he barely seemed to see me at all. My mind was reeling with what had just happened, but despite my prevalent shock and worry for Thomas, somehow there was still room for me to feel stung by David’s ready dismissal.

Turning to one side, I opened my hand and whispered “lux.” A small ball of brilliant white light hovered above my palm. It had worked- I could use magic again. I kept the werelight lit and called to David. He ignored me.

I’m a part time magician at best, and hardly the most talented apprentice. Powerful magic requires intense focus and this is one area where my deficiencies are numerous- and appropriately varied. I do, however, have two particular magical ‘talents’ (though Thomas often doesn’t regard them as such). The first, was for making things explode.

And so, twisting _Impello_ in a way that I usually tried to avoid if I didn’t want apples to explode all over Thomas’s dining room, I aimed the spell at a nearby fence. The wood cracked and splintered with a pleasing amount of ceremony. This time, David did turn to me, a deep frown on his face. I tried not to think about how little it looked like it belonged there.

“Peter, you might want to think twice before…” I didn’t let him tell me what I ought to think twice before, just in case it caused me to do so.. Instead, I exercised my second dubious talent- improvisation. I’d never managed to create a particularly effective fireball, but my aim was good and I’d found that if I twisted the _forma_ to merge with that of a werelight I could create a focused beam of light which, if nothing else, would certainly give any opponents something to think about. And nothing much to see for a while afterwards.

I took a breath, focused my mind- something I can do on occasion, with the right motivation- and cast the spell.


	37. Chapter 37

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay. Busy-ness went and happened. There will be another three chapters after this; they're all planned out, but for reasons that will be explained both by the busy-ness and by what happens in this chapter, I've been struggling to actually write the next one.
> 
> Comments are love, and prodding is helpful. If you feel any further prodding is required (and you're quite right, it is) feel free to do so on here or to thepudupudu on Tumblr. It will be very gratefully received.

So I’ll admit, I was taking a bit of a gamble, but it isn’t as if there’s a lot of literature on whether it’s possible to blind a ghost- or if there is, I certainly hadn’t read it. Thankfully, it seemed that you could. David Mellenby fell to his knees with an animalistic cry and a hand covering his eyes.

Sutton was whimpering, but still very much alive and apparently unharmed other than the whole stroke thing. This struck me as odd- if David had really wanted to kill him, even sightless he would have had no trouble at all with the strength of his magic.

Thomas, however, didn’t appear to have got off so lightly. My chest tightened as I saw that he still hadn’t moved, but I couldn’t risk going to him right away, as much as I wanted to. I wasn’t naive enough to think that the danger had passed just because Mellenby was on his knees.

Mellenby was murmuring hoarsely- to himself, I thought at first, but then I heard my name. “Peter, I’m sorry. I couldn’t do it.” I didn’t think that was what he ought to have been apologising for, but that wasn’t a conversation I had the energy or time for right then. “Even after all this... I’m still too much of a coward to finish the job.”

I sighed. I _really_ didn’t want to have to be the reasonable man right now; I wanted to scream, give Mellenby a smack and rush over to Thomas to plead melodramatically for him not to leave me- but there was a vacancy for a rational human being, and I had little choice but to fill it. “That’s not cowardice, it’s morality. That’s the only thing that sets us apart from them.”

Mellenby’s vision must have cleared enough for him to see where I was looking because he answered my unasked question. “Thomas is quite unharmed, I assure you. I combined _Impello_ with a cushioning spell and a variation on _Dormire_. He’s just… resting.” He sounded sheepish and genuine. There was nothing malicious in his voice now, but even so I couldn’t forget (or forgive) what he had done- or at least what he had seemed to be doing- so easily.

There was nothing that could be achieved, right then, by going to Thomas. If Mellenby was telling the truth, I’d find him sleeping soundly and in no need of my intervention. If he was lying, I’d no doubt find myself stepping squarely into the jaws of a trap. The logical course of action in either case would be to stay right where I was, so, naturally, I found myself racing over to kneel at Thomas’s side.

His breathing was easier than it had been in weeks, face unlined and relaxed. He was even drooling slightly, head tilted to one side. I reached out and brushed a stray bit of fringe back from his forehead. He shifted slightly towards the touch and I withdrew my hand before I could wake him.

“You have to end this.” Mellenby’s voice reached me but I didn’t turn away from Thomas. He sounded like he might have been crying, but my sympathy for him was limited at that moment. For all that he hadn’t apparently caused any actual bodily harm, Sahra, Lesley and Lewis were still frozen, Thomas was still on the floor and now he was suggesting that I be the one to kill Sutton.

I was pissed, and that wouldn’t help anyone. I took several deep breaths and carefully didn’t look away from Thomas. “It _is_ over. Woodville-Gentle is gone and Sutton won’t be using magic again if he wants to live.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Mellenby’s voice was so close that I gasped and almost toppled forwards onto Thomas. I hadn’t heard him move. “You have to finish _me_.”

My mouth felt suddenly dry. I licked my lips and cleared my throat nervously before replying. “Don’t be stupid, there’s no need to…”

“There is,” Mellenby- David- cut in firmly. “As long as I continue to exist, Thomas’s magic will remain depleted.” I opened my mouth to inform him that I was sure Thomas would rather have less magic and David still around than the opposite but David raised his hand to indicate that he hadn’t finished yet.

That was probably for the best, really. It saved me from having to face up to my own awkwardly conflicting feelings on the subject. I mean, it’s not like I was entirely fine with the idea of having to share Thomas- I’m only human, after all- but this was _David Mellenby_ , my university pin up (of sorts). I’d probably have ended up trying to talk two Victorians into a threesome and I didn’t even know if David could- you know- what with him being…

“Peter?” David’s voice managed to cut through the fog of my thoughts and I turned to look at him. Unfortunately, since I was on crouched on the floor beside Thomas, I found myself at eye level with his groin, which didn’t help matters much. I forced myself to look up at his face. His cheeks were tear stained, but his expression was exasperated. That was good; exasperation was familiar ground.

“As I was saying…” I attempted to look suitably chastened at having apparently missed some of the conversation. “I’m dangerous like this. The power is… intoxicating. I could level cities if I chose to, and I can’t guarantee that I would not. If I did, no one would be able to stop me.”

I knew the truth of his words, though that didn’t mean I had to like it. He hadn’t harmed anyone yet, but if I hadn’t distracted him, he might well have done so. And once he started down that path, I could easily see how it might continue. But, even so… “You’re a good man. You’d stop yourself.” Even as I said the words, I wasn’t sure I believed them. Many good men had been corrupted by less.

He rested a hand on my shoulder and looked at me with something like awe. As uncomfortable as it made me, we were apparently having a moment and I was mature enough to hold his gaze. Just about. “Even after all… you still think that?”

I nodded. “I’m not exactly… happy… about what you did.” I took a deep breath; this was hardly the moment to go into just how furious I still was about it all, and why. And how, somehow, the thing that still annoyed me the most was that he had ignored me. “But you didn’t just not hurt anyone by chance- you made sure you didn’t.”

“I took no precautions against harming Sutton other than to misaim. And that wouldn’t have lasted much longer when I had neutralised possible opposition.” I felt suddenly cold. If ignoring me had failed to suffice, I had no particular fear that David would have harmed me anymore than he had the others. But he could easily have rendered me just as incapable of acting against him, and then, without witnesses to make him consider the consequences…

“Right,” I replied shakily, “but still…”

David shook his head, “it’s been an unexpected joy to see this new world, but it’s not one I would ever have asked for. The reasons for which I killed myself in the first place still apply: I won’t risk Thomas, and I won’t risk others who might come to harm through my knowledge or magic. Already I’ve caused enough pain.” He looked from me to Thomas and back again and I rose shakily to stand.

“You’re sure about this?” I asked.

“Quite sure. You must destroy the painting and me with it.”

“Then I will…” David’s shoulders slumped with such visible relief that I suddenly felt like crying. I refrained, but less because I’m a manly man and more because I was too dehydrated for tears. I forced myself to continue, “when Thomas wakes up.”

He tensed again in an instant, but I held firm. “Last time you didn’t leave him so much as a note. If you think this is really the only way, you explain that to him. If you love him as much as I think you do, you won’t let him feel the same guilt he did then. You’ve never been a coward, David; don’t start now.” I thought my little speech went surprisingly well given that I was swaying on my feet as I delivered it.

A hand reached out and clapped me on the shoulder; I stumbled slightly and might have fallen into an embarrassing heap had it not gripped me an instant later. “You’re a cunning man, Peter Grant,” David’s tone was fond, now. He sighed. “Very well, then. I trust your superior judgement where Thomas is concerned.”

I almost preened. But then I realised what this meant. I’d just made him agree to off himself for a second time- and with my help- with Thomas as a witness to it. Why couldn’t I just have done it quickly and told Thomas he’d run off to a remote village in the Outer Hebrides? Wouldn’t that have been kinder?

It seemed I’d find out soon enough- Thomas, no doubt disturbed by our nearby voices- was beginning to wake.


End file.
